


Weep No More, My Lady

by Rydain



Series: As the Chips Fall [4]
Category: The Sexy Brutale (Video Game)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst, Background Slash, Break Up, Erotica, F/M, Friendship, Het, No Spoilers, Pre-Femslash, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-27
Updated: 2018-11-18
Packaged: 2019-03-24 15:20:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 31,712
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13813926
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rydain/pseuds/Rydain
Summary: Beyond every fading twilight is the dawn of a new day.





	1. Music of the Night

**Author's Note:**

> Contemporary AU, more Gatsby than gameverse - plays fast and loose with some details to allow more freedom in worldbuilding. Either a possible precursor to canon or merrily divergent, depending on your sense of the game's era and how many spoilers you prefer to hang over everyone's heads. No spoilers for the overall game plot, though there are a few for bits of character back story I preserved instead of rewriting to suit my purposes.
> 
> For those who wish to read the details of Tequila's first collaboration with Redd, she makes her grand entrance in chapters 4 and 5 of Strange What Desire.

It sure was a lovely pendant, a triple swirl of white gold studded with diamonds. As simple and elegant as Tequila's sheath of powder blue and the silver comb in her updo, as bright against her pale skin as it was on black velvet display. A fashionably late souvenir of an early Viennese spring, of a stroll through the stylish Kohlmarkt between the obligations of Lucas' business and the pleasure of the opera. Which had Tequila smiling at Carmen's sensual pride and the imagined thrill of stepping into her flamenco shoes, all crimson lace and lyrical fire without a single hoot to give right up through her tragic end.

This necklace should have been as much of a joy and then some, gifted by surprise like the others before it. Clasped around Tequila's neck so gently after she just caught the approaching swish of shoes on carved rug and the spice of Lucas' cologne. Warmed against her skin as Lucas led her to admire it, smiling into the gilded mirror with the satisfaction of indulgence. Instead it was delivered on Tequila's breakfast tray with a calligraphed note of apology for the otherwise empty bed she awoke to, and it sat on her like a kiss of ice.

"Oh, quit being such a cotton picking dumbbell."

Tequila felt like even more of one realizing she had said that out loud, but that was just too fitting. She had no call to be crying over a bauble with enough figures on its price tag to upgrade her old Kentucky home to a doublewide, especially not here in this sumptuous British estate of bespoke and vintage glamor where that whole place would fit in her cream and tan bedroom with enough space left over for a vegetable patch. Or over Lucas going off by himself as he was already apt to do when his wheeling and dealing took him somewhere without a show for them to catch or a stage for her to sing on. But he would ask her if he had notice and tell her when he didn't, even if she had to be woken in the middle of the night for a farewell whisper barely remembered in the morning.

A soft knock came at the door in response to the bell Tequila had rung after giving up on a meal gone inexplicably tasteless, and she wondered if Miss Higgins had overheard her before remembering that there was no reason to care. The Brutale's staff were discreet to the point of distance, cleaning and serving with few enough words that Tequila first thought she had somehow managed to offend them. Doubly so when she asked after Lucas' return date some time back when he left without giving her one, receiving a long enough moment of confusion before nonresponse to get the message across loud and clear. She learned that was all par for the course, just as Miss Higgins took the carved porcelain tray with neither glance nor comment at the leftover melon balls, the halfway eaten wedge of frittata, the bitten crescent of scone covered in marmalade.

"Will there be anything else?"

Tequila asked herself as much in response to those words lightly starched as Miss Higgins' white apron. Lucas had swept her off her feet with his raven intensity and razor edged poise, with kind and clever words for her compositions throwing jazz hands back to the classics of musical theater. With late nights at the piano to share a few of his own, then a deeper play of hands and tongue in the crimson den of his guest chamber. Then whispers of fame and fortune, of audacity and adventure. All the world her stage, and he its master of ceremonies.

Now Tequila traveled on Lucas' arm to Bonn and Milan and Barcelona, to soirees of the staggeringly rich like the gig that had made their acquaintance. She snapped streetscapes and fashion and food, snippets to send home when this whirlwind across continents left no room to call. Here, alone by surprise in its wake, she had the slight but growing hunch that it was leaving her out to dry.

And enough work to be done that there was no point in worrying herself about it any further. Tequila always had a new song to learn, an old one to polish, a scrap of verse or melody to poke at until it took greater shape. Today there was something else - the tick of the rococo grandfather clock in the parlor, echoing in her head like a grave metronome.

It continued to do so as Tequila settled at the baby grand in the practice room, leafing through her composition notebook in search of a seed to take root. Seeing only chicken scratch, nebulous and nonsensical as dreams scrawled down on first waking. Flat against that funereal march, which was sharp enough in its persistence that a slow dirge of chords began to follow.

"Thorpe Hamlet, right? Yes, I did… Yes, just now… Yes, very much. It already looks just about perfect… Of course. Can we stop back there tomorrow?… Not until four… All right, love. See you soon."

Redd wandered in from the hall, stopping short as he stashed his phone in his khakis. He had the broad muscled height of a linebacker and the casual tidiness of a professor, and he played piano with such finely tuned passion that some orchestra ought to have snapped him up long ago. Tequila counted her lucky stars that he was here to play for her instead, finding time for them between his own practice up here, his shifts down in the casino, and a romance that was starting to sound close to official.

As on their first happenstance in this same chamber, Redd looked so surprised to see Tequila that she had to laugh - which, if nothing else, was better than crying. "Still seeing ghosts, Mr. Redd? I thought you were a man of science."

"And I thought you were in New Orleans." Of course Redd would know when and where - he was a head croupier, after all, and close enough to that sort of news, even if he had about as much advance notice as Tequila did. "Are you leaving later today, then?"

"Lucas left. I'm staying put. There's no show I've been itching to see, no shindig worth dropping in on. Nothing back there I haven't seen twice over already."

"No sense in all that jet lag," Redd concluded instead of coming up with something or another Tequila might not have gotten around to while living there, some overlooked gem dug up in his travel research beyond picking her brain about what Greyson might get a particular kick out of. Letting her excuse slide for the sake of discretion, even if he didn't outright buy it.

"Like I said. A man of science."

"Arts and literature, technically speaking. Though I rather proved your point with that phrasing."

"I guess you did, didn't you? So what are you up here to work on?"

"I should ask the same of you. I didn't mean to disturb."

"No disturbance at all. I was just trying on a thing or two." Tequila jotted down the sequence of fifths she had been playing, more to transfer them out of her head than save them for a possible later. "I'm not sure I like how it fits."

"Could I help you tighten it up a bit?"

"That's all right, Mr. Redd." Tequila closed her notebook as she decided to open her mouth a bit further. "It's already too close for comfort."

"Sounds like you're having a day."

Tequila wanted to say it was more like a month, and that was being generous. However long it had been since Lucas last asked about her work, her thoughts on where to take it beyond the sporadic whims of his road show. Hid offhand haiku in her jewelry box, ribbons at unsung treasures within his extensive glass cases of rare manuscripts. Kissed her hand just because, in public or otherwise, his obsidian eyes reflecting the light of her own. But there was no sense in sorting this out, let alone bothering Redd with it. Not when he had drifted in here on the cloud of Greyson's beard with some noise of success at their ongoing search for a house - and not when Tequila had no real place to start.

"I was. I'm not about to write it off just yet."

"Did you want to write something else, then?" Redd perched on the bass end of the piano bench, played a jaunty flourish. "Or do a bit of improv?"

"If I can get that elegy out of my head first. I'm still stuck on it well enough that we're going to have to call in a tow truck."

"How about the cavalry?" Redd started up Wagner to summon the riding valkyries, building his arrangement as Tequila felt the spread of a smile. "See? No tow needed. Just a tuneup."

"In the most literal possible sense."

They warmed up and settled in to work on something new and light, a meringue puff of modern jazz Redd had recently discovered. A breeze over a walking bass line, sunshine against the soft grey skies over the Brutale's blooming gardens. Tequila's voice should have sailed right in, taken its liberties as she eased into the joy of the lyrics. Instead it lagged, flat and lifeless as the words on her tongue.

"I shouldn't be dragging like this." Tequila took a drink of water from the bottle she had brought down with her. "I just can't get into it, can I?"

"Perhaps the ghost is afoot after all. Afloat, rather."

Tequila's mood lifted a notch with that gentle tease. "Don't you mean technically speaking?"

"If such terms can apply to the supernatural."

"I'm being haunted by something, that's for sure. Even if it's just the wrong side of the bed I woke up on."

"Time to bring out the big guns, then?" Redd launched into the finale of the 1812 Overture, somehow so popular on the Fourth for a song about a war in Russia. He put enough of his strength into it, with crashing bass chords in place of percussion, that Tequila almost managed to return his smile when he looked up at her so expectantly.

"Time for a break, at least for me. You can feel free to just go on ahead."

"Actually, I have to go soon anyhow." Redd glanced down the hallway as footsteps approached. "Or right now, for that matter."

Greyson strutted into the room in silver hoops and a sapphire ring and a blue suit coordinating with Redd's argyle sweater vest, already decked out for evening at high noon. "I wish I'd known you two were teaming up today. Sad to see I missed the show."

"It wasn't much of a show, at least not from me. Probably more of a tractor pull." Tequila shrugged. "The mud won."

"It happens to the best of us. I tested this high security padlock the other day, should have been a ten-minute crack job. Took me a bloody hour and change."

"And some colorful experiments in free verse," Redd added. "Even more so than usual."

"You were reading _Gravity's Rainbow_ , right? So right on for atmosphere, then."

"Verbal bombs and V-2 rockets. Perhaps I shouldn't have tuned you out somewhere around the intersection of Knobstain and Arsewomble."

"Of course not. You missed the best part."

"Care to catch us up with the highlight reel?"

Greyson put on a cartoonishly medieval accent. "Besmirch a fair lady's ears with the filth of my tongue? Do you truly take me for such a scoundrel?"

"And me for such a shrinking violet?" Tequila gave a snort at this show of gallantry from a man of various rude impressions that admittedly had enough truth to be funny. "You'd sound like Sunday services next to certain of the folks I grew up with."

"In that case, sounds more like I'm losing my touch."

Redd quirked a suggestive brow. "That, or it's otherwise occupied."

"What can I say?" Greyson took impish hold of Redd's arm. "You're rather more than a handful."

"And also in need of lunch. Shall we?"

Greyson looked at Redd, received a nod, turned to Tequila as if playing the life of their party of three. "That means you, too, if you want. Turkish on the waterfront - how about it?"

Tequila thought about a change of scenery and companionship. Maybe she would be a plus one rather than a third wheel, warm at all those shared jokes and close touches without feeling the chill of Lucas' distance. Force a convincing smile at his name when it came up in chatter, the inevitable poke beyond the mask of his presence - which, even in private, might as well be the black and purple Carnival beak worn at his grandest of parties.

"I had a late breakfast. I'm not all that hungry just yet."

"Have a pint, then," Greyson suggested. "Or two. I'm not counting."

"I'm a lightweight and a weeper. No sense in being a storm cloud over your sunshine."

Redd had the sense to give Tequila a look of encouragement rather than disbelief that she had anything to be weepy about. "After the tales of woe at my tables, I'd bet you're no worse than a sprinkle."

"You know I'm not much for gambling."

"No time like the present to change that."

Greyson laughed. "And I'm the bad influence around here?"

"You boys go on about your business." Tequila settled back down at the piano with her notebook. "I'll be the one to worry about mine."

As Redd turned to follow Greyson outside, a skeptical note sneaked into his standard phrase of inspiration. "The show must go on, right?"

"Right as rain, Mr. Redd."

* * *

Maybe it had to do with the catnip bush among pots of ginger and parsley and angelica in the walled courtyard, or more so with the bits of boiled chicken set out on the floral ceramic plates Tantin Eulalie had left behind along with her fine buttoned dresses trimmed in lace, her mortar and pestle and treadle, her volumes of spidery notes on charms and powders and the materials of their creation. Or maybe it was the nature of the cat herself, a creature as drawn to the veil between worlds as Willow was to speak through it. No matter the cause, Willow's garden was blessed with offerings not so far from the ones she set out herself. A mouse under the comfrey bush, a chipmunk by the lion head fountain on a wall of brick and ivy. And now - after pain perdu and coffee strong enough to slap the top hat off Baron Samedi when he came for his share - a fresh delivery from just around the block on Rue Dumaine, trotted right up to Willow and dropped at her slippered feet.

"There's shrimp in your future, yes." Willow bent to stroke Nimbus' head as she wound through her ankles. "Just as long as you've a mind to stop back for supper."

Willow slipped on thin leather gloves and made the sign of the cross over the sparrow Nimbus had so proudly brought her. She cradled its body and set it beneath an upturned flower pot, safe in a distant corner where the insects could take their course. In a fortnight there would be bones, cleaned and sorted and sanctified, for jewelry or gris gris or divination if they were more apt to call out than whisper.

The shadow did neither as it waited beneath the eaves in the corner of Willow's eye. He, rather, who dressed just as darkly even in summer's deepest swelter. Who came as he pleased and as of late unannounced, ever since he sought the story behind his new necklace of iron keys and alligator teeth and the skull of Mama's dear old black cat who had peacefully passed in the night. And that of Willow herself, kin to the queenly Marie Laveau - a cousin removed off the faint ink of her family tree but still so close to her power.

With a questioning sort of pause, Lucas reached for the lush blue garlands of morning glories trailing from their basket. Willow gave no move or word for him to stop as he plucked a flower and held it to his nose.

"So splendid in bloom, so quick to wither and die." Lucas meditatively turned the blossom in his fingers. "And perhaps not so apt to return in the spring."

"So early in summer to be speaking of fall."

"Is it?" Lucas put the morning glory in the buttonhole of his tailcoat as if setting it on a grave. "I know a place or two where it's already winter."

Willow saw a steady stream of clientele from the voodoo shops on Rue Royal that sold her handiwork. She offered guidance to the lost and solace to the unfortunate, weathered the odd request for lottery numbers and love predictions and other such trivia the spirits were in no mood to deliver. When Lucas came to her as with a magnifying glass, Willow expected a demand for some parlor trick in trade for the bills fanned out on her burled cypress table. Instead he complimented her book collection, asked about her artwork, took inventory of the herbs and bones and nails and stones arrayed in glass jars along a kitchen wall. Lucas only began to speak of himself in later visits, in questions and observations meandering around every weight on his mind. Lodestones, so to speak, drawing Willow in deeper the more they dug in to hide.

This chat of seasons was typical in the dry chill of its words, a draft beneath a door still firmly locked shut. It was also very Lucas to act first and ask later, as he did when Willow made them both comfortable in her sitting room with a pot of mint basil tea.

"What exactly am I interrupting? Nothing of grave import, I hope."

"That's all done and over with, in more than one sense of your speaking. Until it comes time for the harvest, but I doubt you're thinking to sit here that long."

Lucas leaned back on his red velvet couch, staring distantly at the icon painting of Erzulie Dantor just left of the parlor door. "How much would it cost me to do that?"

"The rates, I could name. The price?" Willow took a drink from her sugar skull mug. "That's a question for you."

Lucas sipped from his own as if doing the math, or looking to wait out that line of conversation along with whatever he had a mind to hide from. "That's a terribly long balance sheet, and I've never claimed to be much of an accountant." A rueful quirk of the lips. "Or, for that matter, balanced."

Lucas had made Willow's acquaintance as a gambling man, reckless and grandiose and excessive. Lately he painted himself in negative space, in the void between sensibilities he seemed to give up on finding as he let slip a wish to do so. Willow gave her tarot deck a thorough shuffle and let Lucas cut it for good measure. She spread three arcs across her table to bridge the gap between the untouchable and the tangible, the present and the future, old habits and fresh hints of insight.

"Let me guess, if I might be so pompous as to do so in your presence." Lucas contemplatively folded his hands. "Pick a card, any card?"

"Three cards all told, but that's the idea, yes."

"How much do you care to bet I pull a joker?"

"I've been known to chase after a long shot now and then." Willow raised her brow a hair. "Not so much a fool's wager."

"Not so foolish, perhaps, if it paid out against those odds. Leisure. Luxury. Or even a grand estate." Lucas smiled, calling to mind a tale of his about a fortuitous spin of the roulette wheel that had landed him in the tawdrily named manor he was so proud to be remaking in his image. "What would you stand to gain?"

Willow saw no point in explaining the concept of having enough to a man who seemed ever less apt to do so himself as he set out after more and more. "I'd say we're better off thinking about what you stand to lose."

The pall over Lucas' dark eyes said it all as he drew his cards and handed them to Willow to arrange. She had more intricate spreads for other purposes, for clients who stepped through her door with some pressing question. Lucas was a question himself, a drifting boat in need of a beacon. His few of near eighty did not include the Fool they had so fittingly jested about, which would have been so close to his risky caprice. Still their three-pointed star shone brightly enough that Willow almost had to blink.

"You'd made mention of a balance sheet." Willow indicated the scales of Justice. "Here she is."

"You forced my hand, didn't you? I should have seen that coming."

"Then I should have agreed to that bet, but I didn't. I trust you can add two and two, yes?"

"If I could, I'd be sorting this all out myself. Do go on."

Maybe Lucas was in financial trouble, deep in red ink from the business dealings that had long since been turning him pensive when they came up in passing. Or maybe he was more generally askew beyond his usual eccentricity. The card had served its purpose regardless, a lightning rod to the currents of a nebulous atmosphere. A breach in the clouds, a peek at the rocky landscape below.

"It's overwhelming, yes? So many facets of life, so many weights on the scale. Your travels. Your home. Your business." Willow paused for effect as Lucas followed along. "Your love."

The last bit called back to their chats about a singer all set to cross the ocean with Lucas, the joy in his breath of her name. That joy was nowhere to be seen in the distance of Lucas' expression, the brief flutter of his eyes, the slow nod reflecting a pull of gravity within his heart.

"Miss Belle's not here with you, no? I suppose she's as busy with her work as you are with yours."

"That's possible. I have enough of my own that it's hard to keep track of anything else." Lucas gave a dismissive chuckle. "Let alone anyone else's."

"Then that's the main debt on your ledger, yes?"

Lucas flinched at the keyword in that question. "Must you put it in those terms?"

"I'm not the one who brought up accounting."

"Well, I'd be happy to dispense with that metaphor."

"It's understandable, the wish to take a step back." Willow indicated another card. "The king here would like a closer look."

Lucas gazed off at the aquarium on the long wall - Willow's tribute to the waters of the bayou of her birth, and to Agwe Taroyo for holding this house through the wrath of past storms and floods yet to come - and the brilliant orange and blue of a peacock cichlid retreating into his castle. "That one wouldn't."

"Poseidon has his realm, and we have ours. He doesn't get a vote out here."

"What about me?"

"One against two?" Willow smiled. "You're overruled."

Lucas made as if to stand up and leave, not even interested to finish his tea. Instead he settled back in with the barest sigh of surrender as if giving up on the very act of abdication.

"Now, back to the business at hand. That ledger of yours is long and complex - more of a knot than a list. The more you try to work at it, the more it seems to tangle. You're best off to leave it alone, yes? If nothing else, it won't get any worse."

Lucas rushed his sip into a finishing gulp as if to swallow a sputter. He poured a refill while avoiding Willow's eyes, which had already seen plenty from this self-distraction.

"No sense in troubling yourself, no point in all that bother when there's none for you to start at." Willow touched the King of Swords' eponymous blade. "Unless there is."

"Shred the whole bloody lot?" Lucas laughed sardonically. "I might rather say to burn it, but that would also do."

"Not that, no. No need to go that far. Just to take a good look. An objective look. An honest look. To pierce through the fog, so to speak, that's blurring your vision. And then -" Willow made a slicing motion. "You'll see a loose end or two."

"Then it all falls apart, right? I don't suppose the king has all his horses and men in there to help reassemble."

"I don't suppose it'll come down to that."

"What if it does?"

"What if it doesn't?"

Lucas snorted. "I'm not about to win this one, am I?"

Willow thought to remind Lucas that this was not that sort of a game, or that he was more so arguing with a mirror. Instead she dropped her gaze to the table, then met Lucas' as her words brought a flicker of intrigue.

"If you play your hand right? You very well may be."

"Go fish for a royal flush, you mean." Lucas jerked a nod at the aquarium. "In there."

"If that is what I mean, and I don't need to explain -" Willow left out the obvious note that it wasn't - "I'd also like to hear how I expect you to do that."

"Voodoo, perhaps?" Lucas indicated the final card - the Magician - as Willow curled her mouth at his joke. "Or some intervention, divine or otherwise."

"I expect an intervention, yes. From you."

"I was afraid of that."

"I understand. You're a weary man who just wants to be done, and you carry on like you already are." Raising a finger as Lucas started - "But you aren't. Not at all. If you were, you would have up and left as you were just thinking to do."

Lucas made as if to protest - if nothing else, to hide his guilt at being found out.

"Which is also understandable. You came into my home to relax. To escape. To hide out in the eye of your storm. Instead you've had a hard one turned back on you. That isn't easy to hear, no?"

Lucas looked almost contrite as he shifted in his seat.

"Now I'm asking you to take up that eye, cold as its gaze might be. To take stock of your accounts, both business and otherwise. What you have. What you've lost. What you've nurtured. What you've neglected."

"What there's no coming back from," Lucas finished. "Or going back to."

"You speak like that's a foregone conclusion."

"Isn't it, though?"

"If you keep on keeping on like you are. Winning big, but losing worse. Chasing highs without finding contentment. Pushing those odds, no matter how steep - and how far you stand to fall."

Willow expected Lucas to take some rash pride in that, just as he might shrug off the bad end of some bet as a wild ride with a good story to be had in the bargain. Instead he sat, stooped in silence, as if wanting to be done with his vices along with everything else. Or, at the very least, tiring of his own refusal to examine them.

Or working up an admission, little more than a whisper. "I don't know how else to be."

"How much else do you think you need to?"

The gulf between here and there was clear enough in the distance of Lucas' vacant stare.

"You seek the new, the exciting, the leap into the unknown. Then take a chance on yourself - to grow, to transform. To still be as you are, but more like you wish you were." Willow tapped the Magician. "To be your own miracle, yes?"

As Lucas sagged back into his couch, Willow was glad enough to take the ghost of a smile as a maybe.

* * *

"Are you sure you're all right with this?"

It was about the third time Redd had asked some variant of that question since Tequila had insisted that he was fine to continue the afternoon practice she had walked in on. "I'm sure you worry too much about things that aren't worth your fretting."

"We have that meringue puff, as you called it, that sunset sort of song you just sent me, that short set for the midsummer concert -"

"We have a month. We'll get all that to work." Tequila situated herself in a plush armchair near the piano. "For now, I'd rather be taking a break from my own."

"A rest for your voice?" Redd offered, equally appreciated whether it was more out of discretion or desire to avoid awkward conversation. "I won't bother you for chitchat, then."

"Since when are you ever a bother, Mr. Redd?"

"I might be in a moment if I can ask your professional opinion."

"On?"

"I was thinking about my solo, thinking to try something new. To write something, rather. Or not - it might be best to stay with the familiar. It is my first since uni, after all -"

"Then all the more reason to go for it. Do your thing. Make a splash."

"Or a belly flop."

"I don't think so. You're too sharp to fall flat like that, aren't you?"

"Perhaps." Redd smiled at being talked past his doubt and beaten to a bad pun in the bargain, which of course he found a way to follow up with worse. "Can I treble you for a vote, then, on what to use as the bass?"

Tequila amusedly shook her head as Redd launched into the excerpts he had been kicking about for consideration. Compositions as yet unfinished, to be pushed to completion by the deadline of curtain call. Studies in technical proficiency, restrained and reserved - and a simpler piece, loose and flowing and swelling so high with precarious hope.

"You saved the best for last, didn't you? I mean, any of these would be wonderful." Tequila blinked as if to back up what she was about to say. "But that one brought a tear."

"I very well may have. The rest are older ideas - good ideas, at least I still think they are, but -" Redd looked off with that same dreamy distance from their first collaboration at the past year's masquerade, when he had asked about a love song for Greyson upon Tequila's insistence that he deserved a say in the set list. "That bit was especially inspired."

"It was." Tequila allowed herself a wistful sigh. "I wish we could all be as lucky."

Redd took a long moment where he seemed about to guess that Tequila had more in mind than music. "Are you still stuck on that elegy, then?"

"That's a way to put it."

"I'm sorry. It must not be easy, being on your own like this. Lucas will be back any day, though. Right?"

Tequila hoped so, as it was fast coming up on two weeks since that note was delivered with her breakfast. She had received just one more, a spare and elegant verse of missing her. A phone call dictated by night staff as if to avoid disturbing her sleep, or more so the questions of an unrehearsed chat. Lucas' reason for leaving like this. His date of return. Matters that were beginning to call sharp words to mind, doomed as they might be to die on the tip of Tequila's tongue when she had any chance to speak them.

"He hasn't said when. I'm not sure he even knows himself."

"What has he said?"

"Not much of anything, really."

"That's - surprising." Redd rambled on as if to smooth over his shock. "Though of course he must be busy - and there's the time difference and all -"

And the other difference Tequila was thinking of and Redd might be trying his best not to. How his phone lit up on the regular, as did his face at whatever Greyson had sent him in a stray moment on the road. Some greeting or quip or photo, some busy street or quiet lane or pint raised to another consulting deal signed on the dotted line. Or some private matter that Redd shrugged off as an inside joke, looking very much like his name as the slow spread of his grin might as well have shouted it from the rooftops.

"It is what it is." Tequila shrugged. "Isn't it?"

Redd wrinkled a brow as if torn between his sense of tact and temptation to pry. He neither asked about gossip around the Brutale nor passed along any of his own. Nor was he much for personal questions, for poking after the particulars of Tequila's history and family and home. Only for leaving a door open for her to share as she wished, though as of late she found herself more so wishing for a shove over its threshold.

Not that any such thing was on its way, as Redd gave only a slight shake of his head before getting back to work. "I suppose."

* * *

The subject of Lucas was not raised again as Redd worked on his composition, turned to a fantasy of Scriabin, and wrapped up with Liszt just to drop Tequila's jaw at the spectacle of what amounted to a solo symphony. Nor did it come up when Tequila called home after a late dinner knowing Ma wouldn't mind an interruption of her early one. There was no room for such between earfuls of news about friends and neighbors and relations, the first buds of what was shaping up to be a bumper crop of tomatoes, Uncle Beauregard's battles with black lung and his stolen pension and the medical bills he was still too proud to take any help with. Only the measure of what months had passed since Tequila was last home, and that faint note of hope that someday she might come back for good. From Lexington or Nashville or New Orleans, and now all the way from Suffolk, though the distance of her journeys had unraveled those apron strings to the near point of breaking.

Still a thread remained, thin as it was, as Tequila sipped her gin and violet cocktail to the smooth jazz piped into the bar on a slow weeknight when the nearby lounge stayed silent. Her rings and pendants and bracelets would be a quick sell, her bespoke and designer gowns at least worth an inquiry. Her passport locked up with whatever else of Lucas' documents, but nowhere beyond the skill of Greyson's picks or his nose for secrets. Or for jewelry, and she had a few in mind for trade that might be better worn than sold.

Not that Tequila would be around to see Greyson in all his finery at the midsummer party or the fall masquerade. To sing with Redd, with his crisp arrangements and playful chatter and a gentle concern starting to bridge his professional distance. Who had made her at home in the music halls when she was lost and wandering through her first of those grand soirees, and continued to do so throughout her doubt that she ever truly would be. Maybe that would change - someday, somehow - and there was no return to what she had left so far behind.

Only to move forward, then, and back to the practice room when sleep proved late and hard to come by. Tequila brought out a book of scales Redd had fetched for her when she asked how his hands learned to move as they did. She settled into the slow discipline of fingering, her distraction from the silence of empty halls and a head full of thoughts that might otherwise lead her to pace them. Though Tequila was inspired to close her exercises and open her notes, to return to that other measured rhythm ticking through her like a heartbeat. Then to raise her voice in song, wordless and plaintive and almost lamenting.

"Restless night?"

Lucas emerged in the low golden circle of lamplight, sternly handsome as ever in slim tailcoat and sleek ebon ponytail. Only as he approached did Tequila see the hollows of his eyes, the effort in his steps, the weariness beyond the gap between this late hour and whenever it was he had left.

"Lonesome night, from the sound of it. My songbird is a mourning dove."

Tequila had thought to step back from Lucas when he returned, steel her voice with an edge of displeasure. She was taken well enough off guard by the sorrow in his words, theatrical as it might be, that her own fell soft in response. "I have my reasons. I'm sure you understand."

"I do. Just as you understand the nature of my business, regretful as its demands might be."

"I know it takes you away like this." Tequila swallowed, gathered herself. "I can't say I know why it has to."

"Neither can I." Lucas edged onto the bass end of the piano bench as Tequila slid over more than necessary, leaving a gap he made no move to close. "Though I very much wish that it didn't."

"I wish I could play as well as Redd." Tequila indicated her exercise book. "That isn't any substitute for practice."

"It's not as simple as scales, though, is it?"

"No, but it's a start."

Tequila wondered if Lucas was about to start something else when he reached for her and she fought the urge to flinch away. Instead he gently lifted her triple swirl pendant, which she had been wearing as an amulet since the day of its delivery. Maybe to bring Lucas home safely and soon, or to remind herself of the fortune within her circumstances. Or more so of those under which it was given, and not to let that slide.

"I see my gift pleases you."

"I'd rather you have seen my face when I opened it."

"As would I. Oh, to have been the one to put it on -" Lucas traced the chain with a touch just as fine, trailing down like quicksilver toward the lace trim of Tequila's chemise - "And to remove all the rest with such patience."

"Don't be a tease." A breath of invitation, husky in its weakness, as if Tequila had meant it that way in the first place.

"A man of discretion, you mean, and I consider that a virtue." Lucas ran a precise finger, breastbone to navel, allowing the others to skim the valley of Tequila's cleavage. "Such a sin to show one's full hand at once."

It was not the first time Tequila had heard a variation on that line, nor must she have been the only one Lucas ever said it to. Still it was so characteristic that she began to melt despite herself, turning toward him as he moved close to meet her. As he slipped under the brocade of her robe to glide up her flank, inch by deliberate inch.

"We should talk. About your trip. Your work, and mine too. We should -"

"Savor this feeling. This moment." Lucas' hand, just south and just shy, slid to cup the fullness he had so coyly paused below. "This night."

Tequila went to fend Lucas off, to insist that he save this for the bedroom, or better yet tomorrow. Instead she bit back a gasp at his deft play of fingers, shoulders relaxing as she stiffened under his thumb. Leaned into the kiss Lucas drew her into, slow and deep and tender, as she came to straddle his lap. As he so expertly roamed her taut curves of breast and hip and thigh, toying with the hem of a chemise dangerously hiked with nothing more underneath. Only that pooling heat, which Lucas must have sensed just as Tequila felt the rise of his own.

"Shall I show my hand now, do you think?" Fingertips beneath lace, a featherweight brush of electricity. "Or would you rather I pull a vanishing act?"

Tequila started to remind Lucas that he had just done exactly as stated. Her thoughts fell silent at the hitch in his voice, the care within its seduction. The depth of her need, the ache of its emptiness. The promise of fulfillment, if only for this moment.

This night.

"Where do you reckon it might vanish off to?"

Lucas crept below accordioned silk, stroking Tequila like velvet. Pressing inside, smooth and patient and firm, as she began to rock against him and his words were reduced to a whisper.

"My dear, there's no reckoning involved."


	2. And So It Goes

Tequila caught a nod from Redd as she strolled into the casino in its early afternoon lull. His brows raised in a hello when she approached his blackjack table, then knit a notch at her claim of a stool on the opposite end from a stooped fixture of a Brutale regular and a fussbudget who looked to have rolled right off a tour van and into some play at the high life with nothing in the way of dress rehearsal.

"I thought you weren't much for gambling."

"This was really more of a hunch, don't you think? That you'd save me a seat at the slow time of day."

"Of course I would, especially since the first one's free."

"On the house, don't you mean?"

"For the lady thereof?" Redd slipped Tequila a modest stack of chips, embossed clay in muted red and blue and ivory. "Absolutely."

Tequila thought to push them back with a shake of her head, say she had only meant to cool her kitten heels for a bit while breaking them in around the marble foyer after a drizzle had shooed her back in from the gardens. That conspiratorial glance of Redd's - a hint of mischief that really wasn't, given that he just about ran the place when he was on the job - had her accepting both the chips and a gin rickey instead of the citrus spritzer she had begun to more sensibly order. Her drink arrived separately and well before the others, as if straight from Lucas' private stash.

"Productive day in London, then?" Redd wove a few running cuts into his shuffle as if showing off in response to the photos Tequila had sent of buskers and street art, the gilded splendor of St. Paul's Cathedral, views of the historic city wall and likewise fashion in the city museum nearby. "It looks like you saw quite a lot."

"I did. I brought a bunch back with me, too. Some old -" Tequila fluffed the bateau neckline bow of her mint crepe pencil dress, a Church Street consignment from the era of tail fins and drive-ins - "Some new." Her bracelet from a market stall, a melange of recycled plastic discs in cool pastels.

"Very nice. Goes well with the beehive, too."

A sock bun with a braided wrap, an apparently passed test of that sweet spot between impact and efficiency. "You're too kind as always, Mr. Redd, and more than a little stylish yourself. Do I spy a new tie?"

"You do." A bold geometric pattern of blue and tan and orange, a real departure from the subtler styles Redd favored when he saw fit to tie one on before evening. "Though I can't claim to have picked it out myself."

"Grey has some fine taste, doesn't he?"

Redd looked bashful as if knowing Tequila was out to pay him a compliment at the same time. "I suppose."

Tequila had been staying a spectator, chatting with Redd around the rhythm of his dealing. Listening to the flutter of cards, the clack of chips, the distant bells of slot machines. Watching bets, cautious and reckless and huffed away from after a hard fall into the red. Savoring the atmosphere along with her cocktail, piped jazz and lush velvet drapes and the twilight of brass candelabras. Fluted columns up to carved frieze, peeks of neon trimming the bar. The worn nap of tufted cushions, the ghost of a long past drink spilled on the baize.

"Oh, what the heck." Tequila placed the minimum bet as Redd called for his next round. "Count me in for once."

"Is that all? I was hoping you'd be good for at least twice."

"Let's just see how the cards fall, why don't we?" Tequila stayed on her sixteen, more interested in the details of conversation than those of risk assessment. "Speaking of which. How were you getting along, hauled in here on your day off like that?"

"It's just as you've said - it is what it is. New friends of Lucas called for old hands on deck."

"With next to no notice, I bet."

"More of a hunch, right? It's fine. They were fine. Posh and quiet sorts, all tight lips and loose wallets. After all was done, and not exactly said -" Redd parlayed his shuffle into a horseshoe spread as he caught the glance of a passerby - "It's clear to me the house won."

Tequila got a sense that this went beyond Redd's tip jar. Lucas had been late to sleep and early to rise, even well after the triumph of the midsummer gala that had him hustling around with grand plans and commensurate expenditures. Still scarce, but nonetheless present, and ever so poetic when he emerged from the den of his basement to steal a shared moment between his business and hers. Tequila was never invited into those back rooms, nor did she care to be. There was a lingering stench of cigars, and maybe something more behind the shift of Lucas' eyes - something she, like Redd, was better off not knowing.

"Speaking of the devil." Redd smiled as Tequila felt a presence behind her, and she turned to see Lucas reflecting his expression.

"My ears are burning." Lucas took Tequila's waist with a genteel hand when she stood to join him. "Or perhaps just what remains of my soul."

"How much would that be, exactly?" Redd teased.

"After some of the deals I've clawed my way on top of, I'm loath to put a number on it."

"Still above zero, right? Which is still worth some praise."

"I should say the same for you. Such a good man, as yet unsullied by a place like this. How do you manage?"

"Stubbornly. Someone needs to behave around here." Redd neatened his chip tray as Tequila thought back to more than one practice gone south into pub songs, with or without the presence of Greyson or a finger or two of whisky. "Perhaps even set an example."

"If only more of us could follow suit."

"If you got that line where I think you did, you've rather already begun."

Lucas led Tequila into the great hall, parading them before the valet on duty, a jazz combo just setting up, and a trickle of patrons soon to swell into evening's tide. She felt an echo of her debut at the masquerade ball, of heads turning at their proud posture and formal stride, and that frisson of deja vu somewhat relieved the pinch of new shoes not quite yet up to speed.

"The Brutale in full bloom, and you likewise on my arm. How ever have I been so lucky?"

"Fortune's what you make of it, isn't it? And you've done enough of that with your own two hands." Tequila tossed Lucas a flirtatious glance. "At least in some regards."

"I still had to play what I was dealt." Lucas showed the sly hint of a smile. "That is, of course, until I found my ways to stack the deck."

Tequila once again felt a lurking weight beneath the usual machinations of business, as if said deck might very well be teetering on the edge of the table. She thought to poke for more specifics, some reassurance that Lucas had it all under control. The words dissolved, unformed and unsaid, as they had done on the morning after that trip of his and every other time that never felt right to ask about the nature of his work. Which must be going well enough, if his mood was any indication, as were the new parquet floor of the music hall and the stained glass murals just put in behind the stage. Never mind the fraying seams of the wallpaper in Tequila's study, of the desk chair where she trawled through her style pages and lookbooks for timelessly fresh inspiration. Maybe she only noticed because the rest just shone so brightly.

"Is that how you got yourself back out here this early?"

"This late. I thought I would be done by lunch, not tied up full on through tea. Which I'm pleased that you're free to join me for - or, should I say, us."

An expectation rather than an invite, still flattering in its importance. "May I ask who, or do you mean to keep it a surprise?"

"It won't be a surprise for long, now, will it?" Lucas brought them down a discreet hall, then through a hidden passage to the ground floor parlor. "No one frightful, I promise - just an old friend and a new acquaintance."

"Anyone I've met before?"

"For a moment, perhaps, after last month's show of your work. You might rather know them through theirs." Lucas indicated the grandfather clock, with its delicate floral carvings and face of abalone. "Reginald Sixpence. The clockwork baron, at least within my marquisate." An odd and unfamiliar work of art above the fireplace. "His niece, Eleanor. Erstwhile apprentice, aspiring painter."

Eleanor's creation was a nautilus shell of a staircase, spiraling from heavenly clouds to abyssal flame. A vortex that drew Tequila in as she tried to picture the pastels it had replaced, some landscape or still life or view of a country garden. As she saw that it was made of cards further singed as they fell, with a skeletal joker as their king.

"I thought you just said no one frightful."

"I did." Lucas smiled. "The art need not be the artist. You know that quite well yourself."

Tequila did, though more of her crept into her music than she cared to admit. Her first set on the Brutale's stage, full of hope for the home and career she would build here. Her elegy for the same, catharsis for a case of the doldrums, and shelved for some weeks since those skies began to clear. Her songs for the midsummer concert, warm as Redd's composition - and curated from a list with its share of cold shoulders in reserve.

"Striking, no? The chasing of fortune, the courting of ruin. And even on that highest cloud -" Lucas gestured at the column of chimney behind the painting. "How swiftly it can all go up in smoke."

Tequila wondered what sort of mind would come up with such an idea and what was going on in Lucas' for him to put it up there like that. He did have that necklace of a black cat's skull, those small embroidered bags for good luck. But such were mementos of travel appreciated in private, not hung front and center like a crucifix. Maybe Lucas needed that much of a reminder to keep his whims in check. Or maybe this was its own little walk on the wild side, some fun to be had with the decor. Not her idea of such - not that she had a vote.

"Striking. That's a polite way to put it."

"How would you put it?"

"Well, you know how I was raised. If you can't say anything nice -"

"Say it regardless." Lucas chuckled. "Especially if there's a chance it will be taken as a compliment."

"What would you have riding on that bet?"

"Knowing the artist? The house."

The tone of his confidence shifted Tequila's a touch beyond curiosity into what almost sounded like suspicion. "How well do you know her?"

"I don't - at least not yet." Lucas gestured toward the dining room. "Shall we?"

* * *

Tequila would have guessed Eleanor for that artsy sort from senior year with hair dyed black to match her wardrobe and a ballpoint bracelet of flowers covering her forearm by lunchtime, or some fashionista with an angular and brooding intensity she was too classically fair to pull off herself. Instead she was all wide grey eyes and pert curiosity, sweet sincere smile and a gently confident handshake. Tequila had meant to dress with elegant simplicity, with light touches of makeup and hair gel for that crowning hint of polish. Next to the dusting of freckles on Eleanor's clear bare skin, the flow of her sky blue sundress and red waves clipped into a low loose ponytail, she was starting to feel downright lacquered.

And center stage before an audience of one, as when she had sung Redd a simple song of home in a voice on the edge of a quaver. Lucas and Reggie, as per his insistence - with the keenness of a squirrel and a ginger puff of mutton chop mustache - had dived right into some personal business leaving the women to talk among themselves. Except for Miss Higgins, of course, who served quite a spread of tea and refreshments in the formal silence Tequila had grown to appreciate for relieving pressure toward conversation.

Which Eleanor picked up well enough on her own, along with a curried egg salad sandwich addressed with a tilt of her head. "Well, good afternoon, sunshine." After a demure taste and a grimace that was not - "Or would you rather I call you hellfire?"

Tequila took pause to hear that term in such a cultivated voice, though Eleanor had been more than fine to paint it. "Whatever that is, it sure likes to bite back."

"Dare we say that it's guarding its territory?"

Tequila had her own sandwich - an indulgence of socialization like anything beyond her standard plain biscuit, and left on its plate in case it were some sort of disrespect to try it before a guest - then a long sip of Earl Grey to wash away whatever burst of heat had sneaked up on her. "Around here? It's rolling out the welcome mat."

"Or, better yet, a tongue." Eleanor went on to tapenade topped with a neat coil of cucumber. "A forked one, naturally."

"That's about right. This place has its share of fruit that's not exactly ripe for the picking." Tequila's ear turned to a saxophone filtering in from the great hall with sinuous allure. "But does it ever beg folks to try."

"Does it?" Eleanor popped the small bite into her mouth with a look of impish amusement. "Perhaps it should ask nicely instead."

Tequila wondered what Eleanor meant by that before doubting it was worth the trouble of a question. Just a bit of wordplay, a friendly tease in search of a reaction. A sense of joy in the unexpected, like the meticulous gloom of her art style versus the sunny ease of her own. Which could very well be engineered for such effect - not that Tequila, walking her line between trends gone classic and those that seemed apt to, would blame her. Only herself, lady of the manor, for failing to keep chitchat at hand for Eleanor, and to recall any of such from whatever introduction they might have had. Or that meeting itself - if it had actually happened - though Reggie's balding and orange head was clear enough in the background of the midsummer soiree.

"You were at the party, weren't you? I know I should know that."

"Do you know that you were? That might rather be more important."

"I hope so. I didn't have quite that much to drink." Or a specialty of the house named after its venomous twist - which Redd swore was just absinthe spiked with some odd and stinging bitters, but when Lucas was out to impress, Tequila saw fit to play it safe. Especially since absinthe wasn't, not for her, even by itself.

"Of course. You weren't the one who fell into the fountain."

Tequila had heard enough about this to see it as clearly as that Shakespearean dream of fairies and lovers endured in school and enjoyed in the Theatre Brutale, enhanced with Redd's whispered asides from his long past study of the same. "And crowned himself the Dread Pirate Tuppence after all the treasure he fished out of there."

"Though he did at least keep his trousers on. I can't say as much for certain others."

Tequila was fine to also leave this one to her imagination - or not, to avoid ruining her rose petal jam thumbprint and its thorn of cloves. It must have involved some less agreeable friend of Lucas, some proper pillock as Redd scoffed when he came to practice after dealing for one such type too many, like that storm cloud of stale tobacco blustering through the rounds of blackjack Tequila was roped into before the play. Greyson had made a show of his own, loud and reckless bets to inspire much worse, as the young croupier tried to hide her amusement under a card trick or two. Redd was likewise amused at the skills he had passed on, not so much at the fun being had with what was now both their money. He did crack a smile when the windbag went bust right off the table, which Greyson returned with a wink and a nudge that very much looked like having told him so.

"I hope you can say you enjoyed yourself, even if there wasn't always much to look at."

Eleanor nodded. "That's all just part of the madness, is it not? And besides, there was more than enough to see."

"Some lineup, wasn't it? Did you catch the House of Gauss?"

"I did. Though I'm not sure I actually got all of it."

"I'm sure enough that I didn't." Tequila thought back to the throatless voice of the theremin, the console sort of organ with floating metal keys and enough switches and dials to launch a space shuttle, the skilled montage of appreciable harmonies and experimental dissonance. "Neither did Redd, and he has his degree and all."

"So do you, right? Then I don't feel quite so foolish."

Tequila let her silence stand in for a no.

Eleanor looked embarrassed. "So much for that last statement, then."

"It was a fair guess to make. No harm in that at all." Tequila wondered if she ought to explain that there were no pennies to be pinched between burst pipes and bills past due, the aches and pains of Ma's rusted sedan limping between home and work and Cousin Zeke's garage until it was only fit for scrap. "Let's just say that school didn't happen."

"Well, from what I heard from you, whatever did happen might have done so for the best."

"I'm glad you think so." Tequila had help from a high school music teacher who had long since dreamed of Broadway, lessons in Lexington to refine her raw power into controlled purity. To steady herself and shake off her stiffness, to command the stage instead of freezing in its footlights - though that old uncertainty had crept back, just a touch, beneath this midsummer sky of emerging stars.

"I mean it. You could headline the Palladium." Eleanor went on as Tequila hoped her smile sufficed for a thank you, especially as the named West End theater might as well have been Carnegie Hall. "That last one, in particular -" Eleanor trailed off into humming a light refrain.

"Oh, that? Just a bit of a thing I'd been scribbling out a while back." Too easy, too straightforward - too charming, as Redd insisted after Tequila decided she was in a mood to open her sketchbook a bit further to him. "And figured I was past due to finish, seeing how Redd had his new one and all."

"Were you? Or more so right on time?"

"I could have been. Maybe that seed of a song was just waiting for its season."

"Ideas like to do that, don't they? I doodle all sorts of whatsits, whole workbooks full. I don't always have plans for them." Eleanor took a relaxed drink of the lavender tea her eyes had lit up at when Miss Higgins offered it as an option. "Or usually, for that matter."

Tequila nodded. She kept her share of scrawled couplets and turns of phrase, snippets of chord progressions and melody. Stardust never quite forming constellations, and sometimes more so a black hole of despair with the creative process.

"Sometimes I come back and have second thoughts." A shrug. "Or just wonder what the devil I was thinking in the first place."

"Do you ever think the same when you go to paint?"

Eleanor startled, and Tequila felt herself burn with the shame of trusting Lucas' idea of praise over her own of rudeness as a near mortal sin. But when she swallowed her tea and settled herself, she laughed.

"Isn't that half the fun?"

* * *

Tea broke after discussion of some robotic croupier on display at a Japanese trade show, about how such a device might be made intriguing rather than disturbing in its stiff impression of humanity. Tequila suggested a stylized metallic sculpture, a modern classic of science fiction. Eleanor thought to double down on the creepiness with a literal death dealer, skull and bony hands in a grim black robe. Reggie laughed and said he should have expected as much, and Tequila figured the same for herself about Lucas when he split into a rare grin at the idea. She imagined Redd's bemusement at such a thing, as if it would be any real competition. Any match for his banter and card tricks, his assuring presence in soft sweater and crisp shirt sleeves. His strong and graceful hands that Tequila might rarely ponder in times spent too long alone, though they had only ever reached for Greyson without the slightest move elsewhere.

Redd was full up with customers but free enough for a hello when Tequila and Eleanor edged their way through his crowd of hopefuls into a makeshift spot on the railing. "Back for round two, then? I'm afraid you'll have to take a number."

"More for a look see with this traffic, unless Eleanor -" Tequila drew herself up with the poise of a proper host. "Oh, pardon my manners. Have the two of you met?"

"Possibly?" Redd had a gander at Eleanor as if trying to place her. "I want to say you look familiar from the party, but deception isn't my strong suit."

"And you don't have the heart for it anyway, do you? Redd's a big deal around here, and in more than just the physical sense. He puts on as good of a show at his table as he does on the piano."

"Except when I've just gone back to the early shift, though at least that might be worth a laugh."

"Did I mention he's a comedian? So, Eleanor is a fellow artist - a painter with some unique choices of subject. One might say she's scary good."

"Now that does ring a bell, though I'd rather not ask for whom it tolls."

Eleanor laid cheerful claim to the piece Redd described as just popped up in the library, a Victorian gentleman in a style he named as a callback to that era. A ghost smirked over the man's shoulder at the book in his hand, which was open to a trick drawing that looked both perfectly innocent and anything but. "Does that mean you'd care to guess?"

Redd wrapped his hand and prepared for the next, shuffling in a long and deliberate waterfall. "Sad to say that's not my sort of game."

As if trying to decide what hers might be, Eleanor took in the next round just like everything else. The lush arrangements at tea just picked from somewhere out back, as Tequila had joked of the gardens when asked about the varicolored roses of lavender and bronze. The great hall she had glided through with a composed sort of wonder at its inlaid marble and stained glass and abstract paintings in golden frames. The amber swirl of bitters, from a laboratory flask handled with care, theatrically poured into her seltzer to coil like the carved wooden snakes trimming the chalkboard behind the bar. The zip and bustle of the casino, at which her still widened eyes were now sparkling.

"You saw it with your own two eyes, didn't you?" Eleanor leaned in conspiratorially as Redd waited for her to explain. "Lafcadio's last bet. Lucas' greatest wager."

Redd paused as if considering just how far to take the details of that legend, a fateful round of roulette played for the Brutale itself - named otherwise, of course, by that old friend of Lucas, a sinner turned priest so desperate to escape his den of vice with one final surrender to its habits. A yarn that certain of the staff claimed to have some hand in spinning - or a sodding sack of rubbish, as Redd had let on when Tequila pressed him for his honest opinion. Still he was showman enough to play along in his upright sort of way when such rumors of the house came crawling up from its underbelly.

"That was before my time, and I don't happen to be a time lord."

"That's not how I heard it."

"The time lord matter?"

Eleanor echoed Redd's gentle tease. "The story."

"The story's grown legs from all the circles it's been running in. One of these days, it might very well trip and fall."

Tequila took a shuddering sip of her Diamond Dart, a chilled clear concoction that Eleanor had playfully egged her into trying past her reluctance to drink in front of a guest who didn't. "Do you reckon it would bring the house down along with it?"

"In the best way or the worst way?"

"Whichever you think's the most likely."

"Those odds are beyond me, but one to one for quite a ride. Speaking of which." Redd indicated an open seat with nobody seeming apt to take it. "Would either of you care to hop on board?"

Eleanor piped up when Tequila deferred to her. "I might rather go for a spin, unless that wheel has seen fit to up and leave."

"It's still here, at least I think so." Redd put on that sneaky voice of his that was more so the exact opposite. "Though perhaps I'm just guessing."

"I thought that wasn't your sort of game."

"You caught me. It's not." Redd's words fell playfully flat as if giving directions to the bathroom. "Through that door over there to my right, all the way in the back. You can't miss it, unless you've the ability to walk through walls."

"I'd be more curious to speak to them." Eleanor pretended to do just that as they made their way into the roulette room. "Paper, paper on the wall. What sort of tales could you tell to us all?"

"More than me, that's for sure, even without making a peep. Before Redd's time was well before mine."

"Do you have any take on that particular one? Or at least a guess."

Tequila was inclined to be skeptical, not so much a wet blanket. "I guess it would take a magnificent sort of fool to place a bet like that. In other words, Lucas - especially in his own."

"He can't possibly be that bad."

"He's worse."

"In the best way, though. Right?"

Tequila was fine to let Eleanor think that, especially as she could never be sure. Lucas' folly was his fortune, his impulse his prosperity. His recklessness his luck, or so he liked for folks to think, an impression Tequila had once found so charming that maybe she was more than a bit foolish herself. Though maybe Lucas deserved to have a good story, same as those he sought in the sorts he kept close at hand - something more suitable than bargaining and agreement and paperwork, fat stacks of forms to be signed and stamped in triplicate. And maybe Tequila wanted to believe it, feel its electric thrill, as if to toss a pinch of its fairy dust on her own tale in the bargain.

The wheel of fate, as Eleanor proclaimed, was a grand inlaid antique polished to a high shine and run with crisp and terse efficiency. Not that Eleanor seemed to mind the lack of ceremony as she flashed a bill in trade for a modest chip. "Are you feeling lucky?"

"As ever."

"I imagine you would, living here."

"Being that it's a casino?"

"And so much more than that, at least from what I've seen."

"It's an experience. One I can't say I ever thought I'd have." Tequila drained the dregs of her drink to a flashbulb memory of her first grand Brutale finale, of thunderstruck masks in the music hall and the tears beneath the luster of her own. "Though I suppose I've been fortunate to do so."

Eleanor looked like she was about to ask after that slip of the tongue before coming out with another question entirely. "Would you like to do the honors, then?"

"You're the guest. The honor's all yours."

Eleanor bet on zero - same as Lucas, at least to her recollection. Tequila would have gone for good old ironic thirteen, not that she had heard the details in full as of late. Or sought her own fortune at the wheel, even before she was privy to Redd's grumbles about its house edge whenever Greyson went to talk him into a spin or three. Maybe such thoughts of hers were bad luck after all, though it was more so the math that unsurprisingly dropped the ball elsewhere.

Eleanor was happy enough to leave it, motioning them onward with a breezy turn of her head. "It's all in the game, isn't it? Just a chip left on the table."

"Or a coin in the fountain. Did you make a wish?"

"Doesn't that go without saying? Rather like the wish itself."

"True that. You don't want to jinx it." Tequila turned toward the statue they were passing, stark naked and grimacing in her freeze frame of marble. "Or yourself."

"Is that what happened here? It sounds like you have a story after all."

"Trinity sure does. That's half of why Lucas commissioned her. Can you believe she's blind?"

"Carrington, right? She had a piece at Whitechapel about that particular life experience. I should have recognized the style."

"It's really something, isn't it? So bold and so proud. I want to say shameless, but nicely -"

"Audacious?" Eleanor suggested while Tequila was drawing blanks from her mental thesaurus.

"That's the word. And very much apt, given her love of trouble."

"So you know her?"

"We've had drinks and such. She's lots of fun, even if she does make me blush on the regular."

"Not at your expense, I hope."

"Oh, no. Not at all. That's for Clay. Redd's brother - her fiance." Tequila smiled at thoughts of his square stone face reddening at her innuendo, of that time he claimed a royal flush and got an equally blithe crack about the only type of flushing his card skills had any use for, and what that hand of his ought to wipe in the process. "She's very sweet to me, almost like a sister. Which she pretty much is by association, seeing how Redd treats me the same."

"Of course he does. You're well and otherwise occupied."

"So is he. Even so, when it comes to hearts, he deals in kings, if you catch what I'm trying to say."

Eleanor nodded, doing just that and taking it in stride as expected. It was an open matter anyhow, standard issue around here like all the rest. Like that pirate and her mermaid at the masquerade ball, hand on arm as they mingled and cheek to cheek when they danced. How soft might that closeness feel, that grace of bare shoulder and gently clasped hand - and the shiver of her curiosity struck Tequila as a bit more than idle.

"And when Lucas deals in art, he goes all in." Tequila looked to another Carrington further down the hall, another rictus of sensual agony. "If he likes what he sees, of course."

"That was rather my wish."

"I thought you didn't want to jinx it."

"I didn't. No harm in a fairly made guess, though. Right?"

"Right."


	3. Crossing the Deep

Lucas had taken his leave of Willow with a thoughtful glimpse at the mirror above her aquarium and a casual offer of hospitality in trade for overextending her own yet again. She shrugged it off and went back to her work, to a charm of stability she was freshly inspired to craft. A lodestone to find direction and due luck to follow. Cedar from back home in the bayou, imbued with the energy of a lightning strike rather than burned to ash. Nails, salvaged and steeped in a box of graveyard dirt kept beneath potted marigolds, for securing one's metaphoric house to its foundation. Or pounding sense into a stubborn head, for which purpose Willow saw fit to include a spare - and a shed hair, much shorter than hers but just as coarse black, to tie this anchor to Lucas' whims.

Willow squirreled the charm away with her surprise gifts for other clients, wondering if it might be better sent off than sat on until her next chance for personal delivery. It went ahead and pulled its weight across an ocean, judging by the parcel set by the back door into the courtyard some weeks after Lucas' visit. An invite to a masquerade ball, a calling card to arrange travel and lodging. A mask fashioned after a sugar skull, bone white and lacy black, and the owlish curve of its brows gave Willow such a piercing look of insight that her trace of a smile broadened into a near grin.

The sentiment lingered as Lucas went above and beyond with the luxury of itinerary and offered length of stay, just as the spirits had with this chance to study his characteristic estate that doubtlessly kept a few of its own in residence. Willow entrusted Poseidon to a visiting caretaker, the herb garden to Miss Ophélie in trade for harvests to fill her shop shelves, Nimbus to her home and any neighbors inclined to leave a treat or two. She likewise found herself in good hands - a sleek ride to the airport, a brisk escort through its lines and crowds and checkpoints, a plush reclining seat and cut glass tumbler of Sazerac to send her off to nap across the Atlantic. A cloud upon which Willow was borne from earth to air and back, the full way from her front porch to the vast entrance of the Brutale. Then further up to a richly shadowed guest room of velvet and mahogany, a respite from the casino's kaleidoscope of steady jazz and shotgun dealing, dim lights and gleaming cocktail glasses, lacquered coiffure and laughter like crystal shards.

The Brutale remained a dream on the morning after a delivered breakfast of shrimp and grits and sweetened coffee shared with Agwe Taroyo in gratitude for safe passage above the depths of his realm. A waking one, as the bartender ran a towel over the gloss of old wood and a proper bulwark of a croupier shuffled in style while awaiting his clientele, then in a more literal and literary sense when Willow employed the second key on her fob as if stepping into a vault.

The library slept in dusty shafts of sunlight through long mullioned windows on the north wall. Its stained glass chandeliers blazed to life at the flip of a switch near the door, as did likewise ornate lamps by tufted armchairs in nooks amid shelves packed with memoirs and mythology, poetry and plays, stage designs and diagrams. Arcane arts and artifacts, charms and potions and herbalism, and the chill fingers of a draft brushed Willow as she laid a disbelieving hand on a copy of Le Véritable Dragon Rouge bound in some questionable variety of leather.

"You seem to have found what you were after."

That voice, sleek and dark as its originator, beckoned from the south end as Willow failed to recall any doors beyond the one still shut as she had left it. Lucas stepped forth, low heels light on the flagstone floor, as a bookshelf swung back into place behind him.

"I found something, for certain, that I just might have been. It's too soon to say as much about the rest."

"Well, I hope it's not too late for the welcome you're owed. May I trouble you for a moment?"

"Why not?" Willow smiled. "You've already troubled me for much more than that."

"You speak as if that's a good thing. Black in my balance sheet where I've been so deep in the red."

"Where you've been? Or where you still are?"

Lucas' silence served as more than enough of an answer.

"So it is a good thing, then, that I'm here. Yes?"

"I don't see how I could possibly say no."

* * *

"Tell me." Lucas lounged grandly in the chair of gold tufted silk sufficing for his throne. "What do you think?"

"I think you've outdone yourself with this coffee." Willow had taken a sip before adding cream and sugar as she had done at breakfast from habit of catering to spirits who preferred such sweetness. Neither seemed to be necessary with this smooth velveteen flavor - so reminiscent of Mama's treasured stash from a visit to family in Île-à-Vache - though a late morning refresher definitely was. "It is from where I suppose it is, yes?"

"Where else, of course, but the mountains of Belle-Anse?" Lucas lit up at the cleverness of his sourcing, maybe also at the joke he was about to make. "Among the finest in the world, even if the world hasn't yet woken up to it."

Granmè Clotille had told Willow many a tale of plantations lush with coffee trees and outbound ships well laden with their riches, stories of Haitian pride rooted in the annals of history. "It used to, once upon a time. It's just been sleeping for a good long while ever since."

"Dead to itself, then?"

"In that sense, yes. But by no means beyond revival."

Lucas seemed refreshed himself, at least compared to that weary shadow he had cast in Willow's domain. Maybe that had to do with being back in his own, this office up spiral stairs from a parlor of likewise muted elegance and a painting of gambler's perdition even darker against those shades of early spring. Maybe this sanctum of his had something to say with the warning of that piece and relative modesty of the rest, even if the Brutale proper was anything but. Ornate and overwrought, classical yet cockeyed, carved and gilded with lavish vigor - stylishly embodied by Lucas' wide epaulets and nipped waist, his frilled puff of red cravat, his slacks creased like the sword hung above his polished desk as if by Damocles himself.

It was this excess of the house that Lucas had in mind with his inquiry into Willow's thoughts, as he impishly reminded her after they wrapped their talk of a plant that had crossed such a rough and long past ocean - first to flourish, then to wither and burn, but above all to persist in wait of its tenacious return. Said thoughts were summed up well enough by Willow's attempt to do just that when Lucas pressed her for a word - just one, just to begin.

"Overwhelming."

Lucas sipped his coffee with deep satisfaction. "Don't flatter me."

"I wasn't."

"Of course not. You call it as you see it. A sharp eye with words to follow."

"That is why you brought me here, yes?"

"I suppose, if that happens to be your pleasure."

"It's my calling, as you somewhat just put it yourself. My pride, and more than enough of a joy, even if I can't always claim it's a full hand of jokers."

"All the more reason, then, to step away from that table." Lucas gestured at the silver tray brought in with their porcelain cups, its butter cookies like skulls with eyes of jellied crimson. "And have yourself a seat at mine."

As if Willow were kin to that sparrow Nimbus had brought her, or a mouse she would bat around for a spell before showing it due mercy, apt to be beckoned away from her sense just as soon as Lucas praised it. To be drawn in close from her careful distance, to have scales thrown over her eyes before they could truly see. Which, in this moment, was Lucas' precise grasp of cup and saucer, the just so cross of his ankles, the thin curve of lips above oiled goatee. A play performed countless times before as many audiences, whether or not they were apt to look behind the curtain - let alone try their hand at the script.

"Drink from your chalice, you mean?" Willow asked, though she just had. "Your poisoned one, if you expect I'll buy into that bar menu?"

"I expect that you spread those raven wings of yours for more than just a lark. Once you're settled in your nest, so to speak, I doubt you'll be one to keep them folded."

Willow had the idea that such settling might be more about addiction than comfort, and very much so by design. "I might be one to fly, yes. So long as I'm not apt to fall."

"Don't go too close to the sun, then." Lucas chuckled. "Or do. You'll be in good company."

"I could, if I were full up enough with hot air to get my head so far in the clouds." Willow removed the charm from a hidden pocket of her dark blue cotton dress where it had been biding its patient time. "We'd best off stay closer to earth."

Lucas accepted the gift with the barest arch of brow, measuring its heft in the curl of his hand. Willow thought he might ask what was inside and what it all meant, offering a bet over any guess he had a mind to make - deflecting as he did with whims and wagers. Instead his eyes closed for a long moment as if sensing a heartbeat to which to match his own.

"If I were to be rash, I'd say this means to drag me down. I'd like to think I know better."

"By now? I'd hope you do."

"And you just won't give up that hope, will you? No matter how much of the same one might be inclined to lose." Lucas studied the charm, turning it with nimble fingers. "Or already has."

"All the more reason to hold onto what's left."

"Do you care to put a measure on that?"

"I'll put it like this. You came into my home with distant eyes. Weary eyes. Dimmed, yes, but not defeated."

Willow watched Lucas as his gaze came to meet hers, detachment giving way to curiosity. She measured her words to the slow rotation of the felt pouch in his hand, the likewise tick of the fine inlaid clock on his desk.

"I told you to turn those eyes back on yourself. Your ledgers, symbolic and otherwise. From this fuss and bother of bringing me here, and this show you still carry on with backstage, I might think myself lucky if you'd even dared to peep. But you did. Just enough." Willow held up a close thumb and forefinger. "Seeing as you lent me an ear just now, rather than run your mouth away from thoughts you should be taking to heart."

Lucas leaned back a hair as he showed a flicker of something like relief. The charm sat still in his palm, cradled as if in wait of its hatching.

"That's rather generous."

Willow raised her coffee cup as if to toast. "As are you."

"Doubling down on my vanity? How astute." Lucas smiled. "Then again, I expected no different."

"So you do believe me, yes?"

"Perhaps." A breath, the barest mutter. "Perhaps even myself."

* * *

Willow had a good chat with Lucas before he excused himself back to business like a cottonmouth slithering off into the swamp. She likewise returned to her own at a table among the stacks, fetching an encyclopedic bilingual dictionary when her academic French began to stumble on the dense text of the grimoire. Le Véritable Dragon Rouge was a quaint and florid artifact, more curiosity than reference, and Willow all about settling metaphoric demons as opposed to summoning the actual variety. Still it was a test of her lingual tenacity, a long look back at the rumored roots of her folkways. And maybe more than its impression after all, annotated with scribbles of faint rust and bound in strange leather soft as her cheek - as if it might survive a toss into the fireplace, as was said of the original manuscripts. Or its seduction would waft from the ashes, its lure of the desperate into ruin, and Willow's neck crawled with the presence of that thought as she felt another such sort in the library.

Which turned out to be a tall and strapping fellow with a thick brown crop of hair, pale as most others around here but not exactly spectral. Dressed for crisp comfort just as he was at his card table, unmistakably modest as described in Lucas' attempts to sell her on a seat. _He's a sensible sort, always one to have his nose in a book and not the perfume clouds that tend to follow him. And somehow here working for me, but I'm not about to look him in the mouth - much as I've wondered what it takes for him to bite._

Redd seemed apt to do nothing of that nature as he wrinkled his brow without a trace of suspicion at Willow or her reading material. Only a curiosity in his intense blue eyes, his slight play of smile about strong features carved with a fine hand - which just about led him to speak, but not quite, as his mouth closed as soon as it started to open.

"You can ask if you want, Redd - whatever it is you were thinking to."

His voice was deep and gentle, precise without pretense. "I would ask how you knew my name, but I am rather hard to miss. Even when I make myself scarce."

Willow guessed this instinct was somewhere behind Redd's wardrobe, similar to her skirts and blouses and dresses of subdued fabric and simple tailoring. "So you're in here to get out, yes? Among other reasons, I'm sure."

"It is raining, for one. Even so, there's only so long I can smell the roses, lovely as they are." Redd idly scanned a shelf at an eye level Willow had peered at on tiptoe. "And still so much in here I've yet to see."

"What all have you been through already?" As Redd cocked his head as if making a list - "Or maybe just name one or two."

"Anthologies of Lord Byron. Memoirs of Mary Shelley. A biography of the Great Belzoni. Sorry, that was three."

Willow wondered what Redd thought he was supposed to apologize for and much more about the odd name out among literary icons. "That last one sounds stranger than fiction."

"Or straight from a circus tent, which he was - and very much larger than life. Then a shameless thief, or a jolly good treasure hunter, depending on who you ask."

"No need to ask who'd say the second bit first, no?"

Redd amusedly looked off toward the south bookshelf as if to wink at its secret. "That rather goes without saying."

Willow thought Redd would do just that, continuing toward where he was headed when he broke his purposeful stride. Instead he kept browsing nearby as if so invited by tomes of astrology and alchemy, or more so the prospect of further conversation.

"You've been dealing here long, yes? To know the marquis so well."

"I can claim a good eight years. The rest, not so much." Redd shrugged. "Which is fine by me, really, unless I particularly need to."

"You're one to mind your business, yes?"

"I try."

"Is that why you haven't asked about mine?"

"I didn't want to disturb you, at least no more than I already have."

"Last I checked, I spoke first." Willow slid her grimoire toward Redd, inviting him to look. "But even if you had, you'd be long since beaten to that punch."

Redd leaned down, puzzling over the text for a good moment instead of giving up at first glance. "That's not the French I learned in secondary, not that I remember much of it anyhow."

"That's for the best, unless you've a mind to deal with a devil you don't know. Rather than the one we both do."

"That can't be what you're doing."

"Not at all, no, just satisfying some curiosity. I'm a sèvitè - a vodouist. I serve the spirits who talk to heaven, as opposed to the other variety."

"That's good to know." Skeptical as before, but diplomatically so without that amused tone of disbelief.

"Do you want to know? More, that is."

"Yes. Possibly. Only if I won't be -" Redd trailed off as he cast his gaze around the stacks. "Can you suggest a reference? Something for me to check out, so to speak?"

Redd settled into an armchair with the Zora Neale Hurston Willow had enjoyed some years back and just spotted in rare first edition, a study of Caribbean voodoo as experienced throughout her travels. Willow almost had to smile at his overly serious expression, his care taken with frayed binding and frail pages, his insistence on opening his eyes long before a mouth so hesitant to flap its lips without forethought. The appreciation remained when she broke for a brief look at Lord Byron, confirming her vague secondhand impressions of the dark and brooding poet. He was indeed mad, bad, and dangerous to know - like a certain master of this house, as if Redd were more intrigued than his sense of discretion would let on.

Redd's pocket sang out in pure silver soprano, a bright grand march from chic boutiques and cartoon tomfoolery, the music box Uncle Amédée kept alongside banjos and tambourines and harmonicas in the curiosity shop taken on from his father, and doubtlessly some classic production Willow had never heard by name. Redd fished out his phone and silenced it, grumbling at himself for the oversight as he apologized for the same.

"What was that? Or should I say who?"

"The song is Toreador, the opera, Carmen. The singer - you've met her. Right?"

Someone close to Lucas, but somehow not yet introduced. "Miss Belle."

"Tequila. She's very much on a first name basis, stage as it might be."

"So you've met her, yes?" Willow asked instead of wondering why she hadn't.

"I know her. I'm her pianist." Redd smiled with as much pride as he seemed willing to allow himself. "Coming up on a year, in fact."

"Was that you just now as well?"

"Just playing around, literally. That was a guess at the arrangement, and really rather simple, but it seemed all right to her."

"It seems more than that to me. And to you, since you've kept it so close at hand."

"It was a good session. A good day. She had just seen the show on holiday, and she kept breaking out into the highlights." Redd held up his phone. "It's not the best recording - I made it right on this -"

"Do you mind if I hear it again?"

Redd replayed the duet as Willow closed her eyes to savor its remarkable synergy. Its sound was flat in the way of an old record, softly edged with echo, distant but forever floating. Like a manuscript in glass, a butterfly in amber, Mama's sepia gallery of long passed relations by their stilted shacks and carved pirogues along a bayou shoreline just about the same as Willow had left it. Preserved at arm's length a stretch too far, but somehow still so near.

"A song of the heart and very much from it." Willow watched Redd as he looked off as if back to that very moment. "How sweetly she sang it for you, yes?"

"For her, mostly. I was just there to help."

"And to listen. Which can very well serve that same purpose, sometimes better than anything else."

"That's good to keep in mind when I don't have much to say."

"You don't always have to, no?"

Redd shook his head in agreement. "But I do have to head out. Rehearsal's calling, or rather just did."

"Go on, then. Enjoy your work. Be where you need to be."

"I should say the same to you." As he began to walk off, Hurston in hand, Redd took a glance back at Willow's table. "Though it looks like you already are."

* * *

Tequila was late to a silent practice room that Redd normally set himself up in early. She waited a good few minutes before figuring he was in need of a reminder, then about as much between her unanswered message and the purposeful weight of his footsteps. Redd was long since done with his morning shift and clearly in no form of hurry, as if Tequila had all day to sit here with folded arms and restless toes that eventually got to tapping. Except she did, as Lucas' obligations had once again dragged him into those back rooms away from plans yet unformed, and the void of that time only continued to remind her of its emptiness as it ticked away without purpose.

"Sorry." Redd waved a clothbound book by way of excuse. "I was a bit distracted."

"You sure were, weren't you? Nice to know how I stack up around here."

Redd flinched as Tequila realized that her poke had come out as a slap. "I didn't mean it like that."

"Neither did I." Tequila flicked her gaze at a glimpse of slate clouds and raindrops through drapes of burgundy velvet. "Just having a case of that weather, that's all."

Redd normally let such moods slip as standard frustration, just as Tequila did when he joined her after being hauled into surveillance to trawl through footage coming up red on Clay's radar for scams, or the rare day when he sent his brutish brick heap of a brother after some trouble who refused to be talked out of worse. Now he paused as if giving her room to go on, or counting up her frowns on a calendar that as of late had been lacking in smiles.

"Anything I can clear up for you?"

As if Redd wanted a problem to solve - a dry throat soothed with honeyed tea, a fresh look at some stale arrangement. As if it were anywhere near that simple.

"It's my own fault, really. I never did manage to break these in." Tequila pointed the constricting toe of a kitten heel, relieving a slight pinch on her instep. "I'm not sure they even fit me in the first place."

"But you thought they eventually would?"

"That's how it works, at least often enough to be worth a try."

Redd waggled a matte brown oxford that would swallow Tequila's winter boots with room to spare. "You can try these on for size, if you won't mind my mismatched socks."

Tequila felt the start of a smile as she saw he had paired solid navy with subtle stripes. "My pedicure has gotten to be a scratch and dent special, so I'd say that makes us even."

"I wouldn't have noticed."

Of course Redd wouldn't, and not just because of his proclivities - which, as per his bashful reminiscence, he had let on with bookmarks of likewise poetry when Greyson's friendliness seemed to edge into flirtation. Redd had a keen sight for shifty eyes and shady bets, for subtleties of theme and character from high school classics that had read as plain walls of text. Yet he figured Tequila was fine when she claimed to be, even when her words were flat and few. Or forced into cheer over chitchat about the house he and Greyson were buying, about blank rooms soon to be filled as her own were still so quiet.

Redd took a token glance at Tequila's toenails when she slipped off her heels and named a song to start with. Then he was back to business along with her, to their Billie Holiday and Bettye LaVette and Sarah Vaughan, and a brief sketch as backdrop when she thought to call for lemon tea after all. Approaching autumn, as Redd named it, a crisp stroll through a low afternoon just starting to curl closer to the fire. A last bright day before the bleak and the grey, the withering chill, the dying of a light there was no sense in thinking to rage against.

"I'll poke at that some more, see how it goes. If it's ready, it's ready. If not, we're more than good on material. But that's enough show and tell from me." Redd sipped his tea. "Your turn?"

"I can't say I have much for you." Tequila's notebook sat on its usual corner of the piano, faithfully carted around with her if only to remain unopened. "Or much of anything, really."

"How about that elegy from a while back? It seems like it could fit this sort of day."

"You reckon I should bring all that in here? I'd rather not open that window."

Redd's voice softened at the sudden edge on Tequila's. "Would you rather take a break, then? Or pick back up tomorrow?"

"I'd rather hear about this distraction of yours. Lord knows I can use one myself."

"It's a travel memoir about voodoo - about as interesting as you'd expect."

The word pierced Tequila like the needles in her sudden vision of a doll, tortured and cursed and drenched in the blood of a beheaded chicken. "Don't you mean to say disturbing?"

"Not really, no. All right, maybe a little, but I'd rather not think that way."

"What on earth possessed you to read something like that? Maybe this place is haunted after all."

"She didn't, not literally, but - Ms. Blue. Willow, rather. A friend of Lucas' from New Orleans. Surely you must have -" Redd trailed off as Tequila's growing confusion made it clear enough that she hadn't.

"Then you haven't met her."

"I guess not." Tequila idly stirred her cup though the honey was long since dissolved. "It wouldn't be the first time I'm the last to know."

"I doubt you will be. She just arrived, and she keeps to herself." Redd smiled. "Needless to say, we got right along."

Then maybe Lucas was just being Lucas as usual, which said more about his manners as a host than the priorities of whatever passed for his schedule. "How did you meet her?"

"In the library, of course. She was pretty well deep in her research but not too far for a hello. She suggested this when we got to talking about her practices." Redd indicated his bookmark, just short of halfway through an inch of pages. "I can be done with it tonight if you'd like me to pass it along."

Tequila thought to ask if she really wanted to know, but she knew it would be good for her to try. "I might have to take you up on that."

"You should. As I said, it's interesting. Appreciable. Hard to sum up at the moment, but not at all like that Hollywood rubbish."

Tequila adjusted her floral bangle of white gold and enamel beads out of its awkward seat on her wrist bone. "Is anything, really?"

"The masquerades, perhaps. I thought Clay was testing my tosh detector the first time he came home from working one. It turns out he was holding back."

"They're almost too good to be true, aren't they?"

"Well, they are a form of full house theater. We have our roles, we play our parts, even just to step a bit out of the ordinary." Redd began to light up with his sly smile that was anything but. "Or a lot, when Grey is involved."

Tequila flashed back to their shared story of the treasure hunt Lucas had cooked up, a trail of clues toward a bejeweled porcelain egg that might never have been more than its photo. "What sort of trouble is he dragging you into this year?"

"He asked nicely, no tow truck needed. As to the trouble, he's teaching me to dance."

"I thought you already knew how, at least well enough not to trample my feet whenever you've done me the honor."

"Not really. Not like Grey does. You'll see." Redd shrugged. "If nothing else, I'll be good for a laugh."

Tequila thought she might very well be in need of one. Last year saw her split between the music halls and Lucas' arm, doubly rushed onstage after fleeting rehearsal. Redd had been her touchstone and since become her rock, and they were all set with their song list and ready to go. And off on their own as well, to the freedom of the party without the pressure of practice, to a weekend looking ever more empty as Tequila tried to figure out how to fill it. Lucas was all puffed up about his guest list, his new business partners and friends by association who looked to be worth a small fortune. His private wining and dining and entertaining, noted without expectation that Tequila might care to join him, let alone that she would.

"You'll be good for more than that. You always are."

"I've been thinking to do one better. Shopping, rather, just a little - it's somewhat of a secret. Or maybe I'll tell him -" Redd cut himself off with some embarrassment. "Oh, never mind."

"Never mind nothing, Mr. Redd. You don't open a can of beans like that if you're not fixing to spill them."

Tequila had enough of a hunch from the distance in Redd's eyes, the hope in his voice. Still she gasped when he handed over a gallery on his phone with appreciation for her mixing of metaphor. Rings of white gold, plain and edged and embossed, to be presented on a knee and then worn in pairs. But not for Tequila, not any time soon, much as Ma had wagged her finger about taking up with a man like this without such a promise on her own. A tie to bind, for better or for worse, never mind if the last bit long since got to outweigh the first - or that Pa had slipped that knot himself when it felt too tight for his reckoning.

"It's still early, I know. But we've been rather moved in for a while - and now that we actually are -"

Tequila nodded. "It's just a matter of time."

"I don't know when, but I know I will. Unless Grey beats me to it - he was the first to the L word, after all -"

Tequila tried to figure the last time Lucas had so plainly expressed that sentiment. He must have felt it enough to spirit her away from that New Orleans walk-up to his lavish estate, to parade her in bouffant and ball gown as if she had also come up in British high society rather than a pinprick of a town in the back hills of Harlan County. As if her voice soared far beyond the stage of his show and could very well shatter his heart.

"Sorry to distract. I didn't mean to run us short." Redd glanced at the clock. "One last song, do you think? Or shall we break early?"

Tequila went to think of old standards to pull out and dust off, to drown out her unwritten dirge once again creeping back into the silence. This time it was different, determined more so than dragging. Unsure what it wanted to be, but damned set to become something else.

"Let's call it a wrap."

"Are you sure? I don't want to be running off on you."

"You're doing no such thing, Mr. Redd. I just have a mind for a bit of something personal."

"If it's anything you'd like to run by me -"

"Maybe later. We'll see. But not right now." Tequila gently shooed Redd toward the door. "Go on. Get out of here on that high note of yours."

"Will do." Redd cast an encouraging look over his shoulder. "And you go on to hit one yourself."

Tequila turned to a fresh page of her notebook, lit a tasseled silk lamp against the darkening rain outside. "Or something like that."

* * *

Tequila's inspiration saw fit to chase its tail until it fell back to a hymn from her childhood. She thought to go check her mail and messages and the social pulse of old friends and acquaintances, kick back with a smooth jazz station mixing modern discoveries with the classic and familiar. Instead she took five and stayed sat, testing out some tricks Redd had taught her. Grace notes and chord inversions, simple dots of harmony along the backbeat. Shifts from major to minor and back again, desire into despair and then catharsis. Slow trudge into steady march, head held high as her fingers kept on walking.

"Busy as ever, I see." Lucas had settled into a nearby armchair with no prior hint to his presence. "I almost hate to interrupt."

Riposte became retort before Tequila thought to mellow it. "Yet you went and did just that."

"It couldn't be helped. There's only so long I can contain myself."

"And how long would that be, exactly?"

"I'll put a measure on it next time." Lucas showed the most precise hint of smile. "As for now, I was rather too enraptured with the show."

"Don't tell me you came in here just for that."

"I won't, because I didn't. That was merely a bonus."

Tequila playfully crossed her arms as if teasing after a confession. "So what are you really in for, then?"

"Outdoing myself, as you were."

"At sneaking up on folks?"

"Surprising them, you mean. Which is just what I meant to speak of."

Of course it was. Lucas ran his conversations like any other act, all on purpose or equally by accident and claimed to be whichever best struck his fancy. Anticipating Tequila's words and needs with praise almost rehearsed in its charm, with a bauble of belated apology for a weekend that had seen her off alone as he was roped into his back rooms yet again. With surgical focus on the sensitivities of her body, on the weaknesses that continued to betray her in the ever rarer moments he found to exploit them.

"Then it won't be such a surprise any more, will it?"

"It's a preview, shall we say. I trust you can keep my secret."

"That's an awful lot of trust."

"Well, it's not much of a secret." As if realizing just how that sounded - "Not for long, rather. I wasn't out to undersell it."

"So sell me on it already."

Lucas gestured for Tequila to turn around toward the far end of the room. On the back wall was a painting she had taken long past notice of and put no real mind to since then. It had been some sort of earth toned geometry, bold and abstract and inscrutable. Not so much any more, and Tequila went up to the dappled twilight pond with a gasp over the ungodly bet Lucas must have won to get his hands on such an original. Which it was, though very much not a Monet, with faces among the lilies as if laughing over this subterfuge.

"Clever, no?" Lucas seemed as proud as if he had taken brush in hand himself. "I'll be sure to pass your compliments to the artist."

"Sneaky, more like. Didn't I just speak in similar terms?"

"That is a way to put it, and a good one at that. Ellie will be very amused."

Tequila twitched at Lucas feeling the need to hang this creation up in here without her approval or awareness, at yet another slip into the familiarity of Eleanor's nickname in reference to her commissions. At the lilt he put into those syllables, a slide of consonant like a too soft pillow that would keep her up far longer than it had any right to.

"I'm glad someone will be."

"Someone? It almost sounds as if you aren't."

Tequila was disappointed in the nature of the painting, in the gimmick marring its dignity. A trick that almost seemed smug, a fruit of creative talent from a tree well up in the stratosphere. A fresh source of guilt as she wondered if the artist had anything to do with her annoyance, then admitted to herself that she did.

"I should be. It's smiling at me, after all. But - it's just -" Tequila finally found an angle to put into words. "It's like I'm being laughed at instead of let in on the joke."

"The joke's on everyone, or at least it will be. That's rather the point of redecorating."

As with the Carrington explosion of statuary rearranged on a recent whim, the tragicomic masks of Runes stained glass installed in the theater lobby soon after the likewise bespoke murals in the music hall. As Tequila tried to remind herself, though those names had never come up so often within brief and occasional chatter. "So she's done how many more of these?"

"Ellie won't put a number on it. She says that would spoil the fun."

"Hers, or yours?"

"Yours, too, of course. Though you've been finding enough of that on your own, gallivanting off to London and such."

"I sure have." Tequila shrugged. "No sense in letting your plans ruin mine."

"My lack thereof, you mean, when business comes calling without calling ahead. But that's not much of a story."

"Just an excuse."

Lucas briefly stuck on that barb before breezing onward as usual. "For me to ask for a better one, if you're in a mood to share."

"What's to tell?" Tequila saw no point in recounting her ventures onto train and tube, her room in a restored row house with red chintz curtains and a calico cat in the painted brick parlor. The satisfaction of arranging it all on her own with map and guidebook and a schedule wide open for happenstance, of nowhere to be and nothing to do but bask in the streets as she strolled them. "I came. I saw. I caught a show. It was nice."

Lucas could have asked about which show or what else, some historic church or cafe house band or souvenir picked up for her wardrobe. Though lately he noticed her fashion about as much as Redd did - or less, when her experiments in stage makeup were bold enough for a brow quirk of appreciation. "It sounds nice."

"It wasn't lonely, if that's what you're thinking to ask."

"I wasn't. You get along well by yourself."

"I guess I do, don't I?" Tequila found herself watching Lucas as his eyes remained on that painting. "Sometimes that's all I've had to rely on."

"I hope you have more than that now."

"I have Redd, for one thing." The thorn in Tequila's side crept into her voice, and she gave into the urge to poke. "And he's been showing me a thing or two."

"So I heard. That song just now was quite the departure. Is that one of yours?"

"Eventually. Maybe. It doesn't know what it wants to be when it grows up."

Lucas chuckled. "Who does, really?"

Tequila had known to keep her grades up and her head down and her hands busy with gainful employment, to make the opportunities that would never be delivered to her doorstep. Yet so came this new life, this gloved beckon into a gilded carriage. Maybe she should have left that storybook where it lay, continued to write her own in trails of playbills and pay stubs from odd hours of working phones and waiting tables. In backing tracks and voiceovers between her ascensions to the stage, in street style and sensible shoes rather than glass slippers that might very well shatter at the toll of midnight.

"Some of us like to think we might have an idea."

"Oh, I have plenty."

"Just not that one in particular?"

"There's still time." Lucas made a show of checking his pocket watch, a self-winding Sixpence original inlaid with the red and black of a roulette wheel. "Or perhaps not, at least at this particular moment."

"Business as usual?"

"Not exactly."

The sly note in those words raised an edge on Tequila's. "Then more so like pleasure?"

"Perhaps. But rather too late for tea, if that's what you had in mind."

Tequila thought to ask who was sufficiently important for an appointment but not enough for her to join - or too much, and she dismissed that notion as quickly as it came. Better to be left to her own entertainment than dragged into the social variety, maybe seeing for herself just how much Lucas liked what he saw of Eleanor beyond her work. Better yet to reach out instead of pushing back, at least while he was still by her side.

"Try something else entirely. In terms of pleasure, that is."

Lucas tilted his head a hair at being nudged off script with such confidence, and too far for his guessing games at that. "Do tell."

"A dance for the ball. A new one. I haven't quite decided on which."

"Sounds fun."

"So you're in?"

"For it? Always."

Tequila felt a tease of a smile in response to Lucas' as he began to see himself out. "It being the dance, of course."

"Of course."

"So when will you do me the honor?"

A retreating echo into the hallway. "You'll know."

* * *

Willow was lured from her studies by the spicy scent of jambalaya delivered by a housekeeper in modest black and frilled white. She left her books where she had stacked them aside to eat, the library for a digestif and scenery in which to savor it. Willow thought to claim herself a tufted leather corner of the bar, a front row seat to the evening parade of casino patrons, a peek into the conservatory if a valet might be persuaded to unlock it. The light through the windowed rear of the great hall had gone from grey to gold, tempting her out into the shimmer of sunset on the flagstone paths beyond.

The gardens were a sprawling melange of cream and crimson, blue and burgundy, shrubs and blossoms ambrosial in the fresh scent of rain. Trumpets of lilies, dianthus like bullseyes, cones of foxglove and lupine and delphinium. Roses in classic red and coveted varicolor, maybe to be plucked for pressing between the dew of morning and any rains yet to come. A memento of the Brutale, a modest taste of its luxury - a venture to touch the rare place where its thorns were in clear view.

And its charms in earshot behind a grand marble fountain of the statuary on such seductive display in the casino. A soft high voice, cool as the wind teasing a few stray wisps from Willow's braid, singular in this solace as it was at performative volume. Like diamond, devastatingly clear - like porcelain, as was Tequila herself, her pale blonde upsweep limned in the sun's fading fire. Statuesque and striking, painted and proud, sleeveless and sleek in a mermaid gown silver as the screen whose bygone era she might very well have stepped from.

Tequila continued to sing without note of Willow's presence. Maybe she was out here to be alone, far from the crowds lining up for a lucky shot or show of Shakespearean antics improvised in apt rhythm and rhyme. Or maybe to be overheard rather than squirreled away in some practice room, and to be approached in kind when she paused for a long sip of her cocktail.

"There is a house in New Orleans…"

Tequila startled before she turned, and Willow froze with the regret of chancing on such an intrusion. But her smoke shimmered eyes were bright, her melody echoing the husked tinge of Willow's. "They call the Rising Sun…"

"It's been the ruin of many a poor girl…"

A tilt of the glass as if to toast. "And God, I know I'm one."

* * *

They made their introductions with shared amusement at names already known - and through the likes of Redd, nonetheless, instead of the usual convivial suspect - and Willow would have left it at that if Tequila had only spoken to her out of politeness. But Tequila edged closer into the space that Willow left for her to measure, and they sipped their respective libations as marble sylphs poured theirs out into the glinting pool of the fountain.

"Whisky straight up?" So silken, so Southern, so far from the sharp urban speech of New Orleans, and so well preserved over such distance from wherever Tequila called home. "You must have some fortitude."

"Amaretto, actually." Willow had a nip as if to punctuate herself. "Though I will take that credit if you're still apt to give it."

"Of course I am. You came all this way, after all." Tequila's pert bow of lips quirked with amusement. "Even after going back far enough with Lucas to get yourself an invite."

"He's given me a run for my money, yes. But he's hardly the worst I've dealt with, much less the main attraction." 

"You'd best not let any of that on to him. He just might take it to heart." Again with that subtle edge, that departure from the concierge's matter of factness or the wry amusement of Redd.

"Or take it as a challenge."

"Or both at the same time just to double down. Either way, your secret's safe with me." Tequila shrugged. "What's one more on the pile?"

Willow wondered if Tequila more so spoke about the house or herself, about secret passages and parlors or a darkness further beyond. About stage tricks and sleight of hand, the sorcery of carvings and clockwork and cloisonné - or ledgers of her own like that weight in her voice, opened just a hair as if to invite a peek.

"That's a good drink, yes?"

"It's a strong drink." Tequila took a pull of the concoction she had called a triple monte - a generous pour of absinthe spiked with that day's double feature of vermouth and gin - and Willow rather knew as an obituary. "Though I can't say it's the easiest to swallow."

"Six in the red, a half dozen in the black. Seems to me that breaks about even."

"Better than certain else around here, then." Tequila cast a glance back toward leaded glass views into gathered crowds, the distant pulse of evening jazz ramping up into full swing. "Because I can say it's doing what it needs to."

Which left the natural question of what wasn't. Redd looked to be easily holding up his end of their business, even if he had been a tick behind the metronome. Lucas was likewise busy with his own, a flash of dark ponytail retreating through the great hall alongside a wavy red mane and a balding halo of ginger. And very much not with Tequila, at least not at this particular moment, and maybe even more so than that. Maybe she meant those words for herself as well, that prick of judgment softened with resignation.

"Taking your head for a spin, as opposed to dropping the ball right off the roulette wheel?"

"That's about right, though I was hoping for more like a balloon ride." Tequila smiled, a ray of light breaking through grey clouds. "But, like I said - absinthe."

"That's your poison, yes?"

"One of a few." A sip as if to prove her point - "Which here I am, still drinking, though I should damn well know better by now." Then another, after an apology for language Willow waved off as no concern.

As with anyone else beholden to a bookmaker or the bottle, to all the wrong friends and associates and lovers, to some taste sweet enough to forget its eventual sting. Or to that very same consequence, that pain supposedly deserved and anything but. "You should know you have an ear to turn to. That is my calling, after all."

"That voodoo business? Redd did say something about that."

Something polite enough, no doubt, from the likewise intrigue in Tequila's voice past a hitch of misgiving, and as expected from someone more apt to take a crack at a book than at questions potentially chased with a bite of considerable shoe. "That's part of it, yes."

"What's the rest? Something to do with those charms Lucas keeps around?"

"That's another part, but it's all to the same end. Consultation. Direction. Spiritual guidance."

There it was - the touch of wariness. "What sort of spirits do you call on?"

"A similar sort as you do, if you're one to speak with saints."

"I'm Baptist - if I still am, even after so long since I've been - so no, not really. But I catch what you're trying to say." Tequila looked toward the sunset. "It all goes upstairs just the same, doesn't it?"

"That it does, yes." Willow laid a palm over her heart. "But it also does its share right here."

"How exactly does that work?"

"More than well enough."

Tequila pondered the rest of her drink as if trying to guess how far she could throw it. Instead she poured it out on the flagstone, then set the glass on the edge of the fountain with a muttered refusal to smash something so nice for no good reason at all.

"Do you reckon you might have a mind to show me?"

Willow smiled. "I reckon it's a good thing that you asked."

* * *

Tequila had gone outside to the gardens to get away, to answer Lucas' disappearance with a vanishing act of her own. To be alone in a peace where he wouldn't think to look, nor to come traipsing in yet again to serve his interests with an interruption of hers. When a tentative alto sang out to her with an old standard that hit just about as hard as her absinthe, Tequila went to turn on her heel and back into the Brutale's faceless crowds. Instead she found herself returning the overture in the same reflex of putting name to curious figure of early dusk and deep midnight. Tequila had no visuals from Redd, no real image of New Orleans voodoo folk beyond the face painted women in bright headwraps beckoning to tourists from posters and flyers and guidebooks. With her modest buttoned dress of dark blue, her loose black braid just about a length to sit on, Willow looked well enough to fit that part of someone from a quiet world beyond all the din and glamor. A world of long hours tucked away in a library corner, of sought truths and offered respite, and that Tequila edged closer to share as Willow so carefully pressed her to do likewise.

Tequila still stayed a step behind as they squeezed upstairs through a cacophony of gamblers and theatergoers, as if to flinch away from the pointed sort of talk to be had in private. Or from the feel of this whole voodoo business, the thorny unease in her stomach that troubled her as much for being there to begin with. It was foolish, of course, like every other sense of what just wasn't right for no good reason she could figure. Neighbors who never once bothered to warm the pews, not even on Christmas and Easter. Folks like Greyson and Redd, like a housemate in Nashville who waxed her face and still got messages for a birth name long since dead to her. Like Willow and her honest sort of Southern hospitality, arcane as it might be, as opposed to a sugared smile over a backstabbing tongue.

"Is this the first time you've been this far east?"

"That it is, yes." Willow poured them both a cup of the tea she had put on in her room of brass lamplight and deep shadows, a sweet potpourri mingling with the ghosts of melted candles on a nearby dresser festooned with skeleton keys and shiny pennies, crosses and cards and dice, seashells and turquoise beads, peanuts in a bowl and a shot of something as dark as the bed curtains. "The furthest I've been, for that matter."

Tequila nodded her agreement to both counts of travel experience. "What a way to get here, wasn't it?"

"I should ask the same of you. Such a brave leap of faith to take, yes?"

"A gamble, more like, if I'm to be straight up about it." Tequila refused to bring up the obvious matter of how well it looked apt to pay off.

As did Willow, after a beat during which Tequila braced for just that. "There must have been some high stakes at hand for you to uproot yourself like that."

"I didn't exactly have roots, not since I left home to begin with. Just some place to dig in my heels until I made it, or made it worth my while."

"How was the Big Easy for you?"

"Not so easy to get set in, that's for sure. I paid my bills, just barely at times, but I wasn't having much luck with the rest. Auditions. Rejections. A bit of a thing here and there. I might get into the chorus, but never center stage."

Willow sipped her tea as if absorbing each word with the same patience. Inviting Tequila to continue as she pleased, dismissing the unsaid concern of how rude it was to go on about herself without leaving room for response. Studying her with wide dark eyes, keen as Lucas' but soft as velvet in a wary sort of face that was just so wise and knowing.

"One day I got a call from a friend of an agent. Short notice, some cancellation - was there any chance I could fill in? Then there I was in the ballroom at Le Pavillon, all done up like the Gilded Age with a set list to match. Which took its share of doing, especially on consignment, but I must have done well enough. One of the guests there was putting on a black tie affair of their own, and guess who they thought to hire."

"A perfect pick, from what I've heard." Willow's gaze relaxed as if to overlook the tendrils sneaking out of Tequila's updo, the blur of eyeliner and shadow from tears dabbed away when her music practice struck a secret nerve. "Doubly so from what I've seen."

Tequila had heard as much from her share of supportive friends and aspiring lovers. Still the warmth in the sentiment brought more than expected into her blush. "You're just too kind, aren't you?"

"I'd like to think I'm being straight up as you are. Now, as you were saying."

"Let's just say it went on like that. Well enough to pay for dressing up for the next in line, but not quite so much as to go anywhere else. But it introduced me to a certain marquis who swore to do me one better."

Willow took a slow drink of tea before stating the obvious. "Lucas."

"Who else? That damn tooting fool." Tequila felt a charge at letting her language slip on purpose, knowing it would be no bother. "Though I can say about the same for myself, going off with him like I did."

"Can you say you had much of a choice?"

"Well, we were in love - or something close enough. Plenty enough for me to buy what he was selling." Tequila looked off wistfully. "All the world a stage, and my name on its marquee."

"A chance to have it all, yes? After all your hard work to that end."

Not a single implication of opportunism or gold digging, of riding the tails of Lucas' coat beyond more deserving performers. "That's a nicer way to put it than some other folks might."

Willow sounded as if she had a mind to give said folks the sharp edge of her tongue. "That's the fair way to put it."

"I'm glad you think so. I mean, it wasn't the only way. I could have stayed put and kept scraping, kept on after some other chance. New Orleans was at least a place where that might happen."

"Better there than back home, yes?"

"Much as Ma would hate to hear that from my mouth." Tequila had to smile as the specifics rolled out in her deepest drawl. "Closplint, Kentucky. Good luck picking it out on a map unless you thought to bring a microscope."

A conclusive nod. "Even better luck making a name for yourself."

"My Uncle Beauregard sure did, though I reckon that could be put to use. One nip of his moonshine, and you're seeing stars."

Willow laughed, a bright flash all too brief. "There's one in every family, yes? But there had to be something better."

"That's what I figured. That's why I'm here."

"Speaking of which, I do have a particular something to show you." Willow stood up to move the tea tray elsewhere. "That is, if you're ready to begin."

When Tequila said that she was, Willow came back with a carved leather box in one palm and a round velvet bag in the other. She set both on the table with some ceremony.

"I'd like to do a reading for you, and I'd like for you to choose your method. This first one might be familiar." Willow opened the box and fanned out a deck of cards that Tequila nodded at when she recognized them as tarot. "The second, maybe not so much." Now the bag, slid across the table with a soft click of its innards.

Tequila peered inside and flinched back before she remembered her manners. Bones, curved and slender and blocky like dice. A pointed tooth, a tiny beaked skull, a reptilian hand. "Are those real?"

Of course they were, with their irregular shapes and varied shades of ivory, and Tequila felt even sillier for letting out that reflexive gasp. Not that Willow seemed to mind, only offering a nod and a note that touching them was strictly optional.

"Oh, what the heck. Let's give those bones a rattling."

Willow smiled as if hoping Tequila would say that. She spread out a quilted black cloth, instructing Tequila to think of a matter foremost in her mind.  She gathered the bones in her cupped hands, warming them with three puffed breaths before letting loose into a gentle scatter. Tequila expected a flashback to a late night horror film, some poor critter gone skeletal on the roadside. Instead the bones were as beads on jeweler's velvet, a strewing of curated treasures.

Willow pondered the constellations before her as the mantel clock ticked away in conspicuous silence and Tequila tried to figure exactly what she might be seeing. When she finally spoke, Tequila almost had to laugh.

"Looks like something of a mess, yes?"

"Or a real one, if I'm to be perfectly honest."

"You are, both with me and yourself. I trust you're doing the first." An incisive look. "I'm not so sure about the second."

Tequila bit back a protest at this shock of cold water, this slap in a face not so brave as it ought to be. This mirror raised in kindness rather than brandished with judgment, which made it even harder to look into - but out of respect for said kindness, she was damn well going to try.

"You're one to stick it out, work it out, make it work. Give it due time to deliver." Willow touched a pockmarked shard. "Like the lesson of the tortoise, yes?"

Tequila's agreement came out more defensively than she meant it to. "There's no sense in being impatient."

"Not at all, no. But there's much to be had in knowing what's worth your grit, and taking your leave of what isn't." Willow pointed out a hollow white nugget beside the fragment of turtle shell. "As opposed to keeping on drinking your poison, as you called it - see this spine of a cottonmouth here - just to prove you can hold it down."

Tequila went to say that was more than just stubbornness, but that would only dig into a point that was starting to weigh in her stomach. "I poured that out."

"Some of it, yes. That's a start."

"We all have to start somewhere."

"We do, and then we keep on going. Stick with it, make it stick. Yes?"

Tequila chuffed at having that turned around on her so neatly, so simply, so succinctly. "I know you don't mean to make it sound that easy."

"I don't, no, because it's not. Not at all. I do mean to say that you deserve better."

Tequila fell silent beneath that thoughtful gaze, the depth of its sincerity. When it came time to speak, she only managed a whisper.

"I guess I do, don't I?"

"I know you do. So do you, even if you aren't seeing as much from where you stand." Willow indicated a small beaked skull facing the assortment it seemed otherwise about to escape. "Looking back on the past as if you can go and change it for the better. As if doing so right now would be just as impossible a dream."

"So, if I'm to think of it in those terms - it's well past time I wake up." Tequila took a deep breath as if about to slip underwater. "Yes?"

"Yes."


	4. Thunder Rolls

The Brutale's guest wing kept its peace long after Willow's habitual wanderings through the silence of daybreak. Its parlors were host to lone readers and long games of chess, its carpeted halls to a muted rhythm of entrance and egress and the odd late night stumble into a bed well overdue for occupation. These past few days had brought a slow crescendo of heeled footsteps and rolled suitcases, of vowed vengeance on poker rivals and tightfisted slot machines, of musings on how the Marquis might outdo himself this year after that concert, that singer, that spectacle of a talent show gone into somewhat of a fight club. A gathering buzz, an electric hum of anticipation that somehow shared its energy with Willow instead of preemptively draining her own.

The soft knock on Willow's door, the same shave and a haircut rhythm from yesterday's lunchtime and tea the day before, was likewise a frisson of intrigue rather than a prod of intrusion. Tequila swept inside in a strapless chiffon cascade of light sky to deep ocean. Her hair was done up in a smooth twist, her eyes in sultry plum and silver. Her mask, some feathered concoction of swooping notes and sheet music, hung from manicured fingers curled as if cradling the stem of an invisible martini.

"All dressed up to impress, yes?"

"I sure am, now that I have some occasion to." Tequila gave a twirl, taking the compliment in stride with no hint of her prior hesitation to. "Not to mention an audience."

"Though you're not quite on stage yet, no? Especially not in here."

Tequila set her mask on the mirrored dresser, a party face in no rush to be put on. "Isn't that a relief."

Willow felt as much when Tequila slipped off her heels and settled onto the edge of an armchair, careful not to crease her tiered skirts. She took her offered tea with less concern, shrugging off the pink print left on her cup as a matter of course. Alone by the fountain and in here with the bones, Tequila had kept a stiff spine as if always being watched from the wings. After their light meals shared in the great hall, a few rounds with Redd and a drink turned to two in the lounge, she was continuing to relax toward the fine line between familiarity and friendship.

Even more so as Tequila turned to study a pair of silk dresses in the open armoire, which Willow had been considering in the flannel comfort of her robe and slippers. "Oh, aren't those just so timeless. Are they originals?"

"Handmade by my aunt, yes, and handed down to me. If only I'd had her sewing skills, too, but I had them taken in just as well."

"I'm taken with them myself. Very dignified, very you. Which one are you thinking for tonight?"

Willow thought that such praise for her style, vintage and subdued as it was, was quite the flattering surprise from one who had polished her own to a high fashion shine. "Tonight's the weekend appetizer, yes? As you so aptly put it."

"One for the whole table and then some, but relatively speaking."

Willow picked out her deep grey dress with black buttons and lace trim to match, draping it over a nearby armchair. "Then I'll go low key, unless this is too much of a dirge."

Tequila laughed. "Redd's been rubbing off on you, hasn't he? It's the opposite of too much, and that's a good thing. This place can stand to see some moderation."

"No need to say who hasn't left their mark on you, then, no?"

A satisfied curl of the lips as if locking that door just closed. "None whatsoever."

Lucas had indeed played no part in their prior conversations, not even to be notable in his absence. There was plenty else to say about the questions of voodoo Tequila was just daring to ask, elaborations on the Caribbean travel memoirs Redd had passed along to her. Their lives in New Orleans, the hills and the bayou, the mechanics and collectors and distillers in the respective trees of their kin. Tales of moonshine runs gone fast away from the law, affairs of old neighbors and classmates Tequila shared with embarrassment about how trivial such gossip must sound. Stories all the same, informing those that she told onstage, and that Willow unearthed in her seekers with a guiding hand toward a rewrite.

"It's going to be some night, isn't it?" A wish upon a breeze, so buoying in its breath of hope.

"It is a ways from Sunday barbecue, yes."

"Or a bonfire down by the lake, never mind the dingaling who always has to play the ghost at story hour. Are you thinking to dip in a toe, so to speak? Or go straight for a cannonball?"

"Seems to me that you get pulled in either way."

"I'm getting dunked, that's for sure, soon as Trinity catches sight of me. Wind, I should say." Tequila reached to pour herself a refill, gracing the air between them with a hint of lily. "Or not - she doesn't like to fuss about words like that. Just to make her own over me."

Willow smiled. "That's what sisters are for, yes?"

"Especially ones well found. Don't be shy about finding us, too, if you're in a mood to join."

"I'll keep an eye out." Willow took her dress and petticoat a few steps away out of sight. "Though I expect you all will be hard to miss."

"Try impossible, unless Greyson sees fit to steal his man away from us, horns and all."

Willow warmed at her growing sense of characters as yet unmet, at Tequila's embrace of such a romantic partnership. "He won't keep Redd locked up all weekend, no?"

"And skip out on strutting his stuff? No more than he'd go for a shave."

Willow exchanged her dressing gown for the formal variety as Greyson's beard took over their talk in its described mass of curls that almost had to be seen. As did the alchemy between a blind sculptor and a retired prize fighter, an upright pianist and a locksmith gone lawful after his light fingers snagged him a stint behind bars - a foursome that just seemed to mesh like the suits in a well shuffled deck. Willow was more for a good one on one, a long chat in a snug corner of some lounge or parlor or reading room. But still thinking to step out of her cocoon and swing by for a spell, be a party to Tequila's before the greater of such festivities sent her back up here for a recharge.

"Well, would you look at that."

Willow pulled her halfway buttoned bodice close enough for discretion, aware that Tequila had been looking elsewhere but not particularly bothered if she wasn't. Indeed, Tequila was studying Willow's bony mask and the hair ornament alongside it, a small top hat with a decorative skull on its band of dark silver ribbon.

"Talk about a fascination that fits the term. Is it a tribute to Baron Samedi?"

"It is, yes - a going away gift from Miss Ophélie." Willow did up the last button at the hollow of her throat. "To keep me in good company on the other side."

"Do you reckon it's doing its job?"

"I reckon you're doing one better."

Willow smiled at a poke about being just too kind yet again as she combed her hair and wove it back into a low braid. In the mirror, Tequila had a close look at Willow's altar, hands clasped as if in reverence rather than fighting temptation to touch. She peered into the fine inlaid cabinet by the door, a phonograph softly crackling through a full spindle of Louis Armstrong from an assortment well preserved from what might well be its original pressing.

"Can't beat the classics, can you? Imagine if your Uncle Amédée got a load of all this."

"He'd want to bring a load of it back with him. He's the one who had me whistling Dixieland soon as I was old enough to learn."

"I never did, funny as that sounds. Especially seeing as how Ma could call me home to help with supper just about all the way from Holmes Mill."

"Is she where you got your singing voice?"

"Can't say she was, or where I did, for that matter. It just is, like this." Tequila patted her hair, answering an unsaid wonder about its flaxen rarity. "Like that insight of yours. Which was the exact thing I needed to hear, even if I didn't much like what you saw."

"If it helps, I like what I'm seeing right now."

Tequila tilted her head, more so with intrigue than suspicion. "This isn't just about my makeup, is it?"

It wasn't, and beyond the sense of the appreciation that sneaked into those words before Willow thought better of it. Tequila had come in for her reading with mincing steps, fingers laced with the same trepidation running through her first mentions of the masquerade. Now she was determined to have her own sort of fun, and just about blooming at the hope that Willow might join her for it.

"It isn't, no, but it is impressive."

Tequila took a slight curtsy. "It's a bit of a new thing I'm trying - sounds like it passed its audition. Were you thinking to wear some yourself?"

"I can't say it's one of my habits."

"I get that. It can be fussy, even when you're pretty well used to it. But if you did want to - maybe a little, just for tonight -" Tequila headed to the door. "Excuse me."

Willow fastened on her top hat and buttoned up her low heeled boots without much thought to this offhand notion. She was well enough content with cold cream at night, lotion as needed, and otherwise staying as nature intended. But when Tequila returned with a small kit and a promise to keep the fussing to a minimum, Willow found herself with a mind to see what plans she had on hers.

"Like I said, I'll keep it simple." Tequila opened her bag on the dresser. "It's a touchup, not a spackling. No need to bring out the trowel."

"Might I ask what you're about to instead?"

"Your eyes. They're so striking, so knowing." Tequila flourished a dark pencil. "Between this liner and that mask, you'll look apt to see through all the rest. Though of course you already do."

Willow sat down with the satisfaction of being seen so well herself by one more perceptive than she seemed to realize. Then came the thrill of a featherweight hand propped on her cheek, a closely breathed encouragement to relax. Deft strokes along her shut eyelids, first to line and then to smudge - strange sensations over all too soon when that perfumed touch withdrew.

The effect was subtle but definite, more so within the eyes of the sugar skull when Willow slipped it on. Tequila watched her lean close and turn her head, amusedly widen her gaze. When she set down a trio of lipsticks, pink and mauve and violet, Willow reached for the darkest. If there was ever a time to go bold, it was here within the reflection of that admiring smile.

"So I see we have a winner."

"We have something, yes." Willow continued to appreciate the fresh depth of her eyes, the supple contrast of her mouth. "I have to say I approve."

"I'm glad you do. It's been too long since I've done eyes for someone else. Please tell me I didn't come near to poking yours out."

"Not at all, no. Just a bit of a tickle, that was all."

"Would you let me do that again?"

Such an odd feeling - such fleeting closeness. "If I've a mind for it, yes, and you happen to have one to offer."

"Any time. It's the least I can do, really, after what you've done for me."

"I hope you're aware that was my pleasure."

"So is this." Tequila set a hand on her makeup kit. "And not just this, if you catch what I'm trying to say."

When Willow met Tequila's eyes as if daring to meet her hand instead, the slow mirror of her smile said it all.

* * *

Tequila descended the grand staircase into a simmer of excitement fast rising to a proper boil of speakeasy jazz and supposed disguises that so often were anything but. Unrushed and unattended, steady and solo, with all the freedom that entailed and no undue pity to be had in the bargain. Not for her proud shoulders and pomaded updo, her practiced stride in sensible heels, her tiered gown trailing just so on patterned rugs and polished marble. Her likewise bespoke mask, designed by Lucas but by no means tied to him, and well enough set to be worn on her own.

Tequila got a few smiling nods in the foyer between the theater and casino, a taste of Black Widow's Bite from the King of Clubs playing barker with a full spread of house cocktails for sampling. At a poker table in the midst of the action was a broad pinstriped back alongside a spill of light brown mane over equally lustrous black satin. Clay caught sight of Tequila with a flash of his furious mask, waving her over with the double punch of a grin and holler. Trinity embraced her likewise with a warm squeeze from hands held out for the taking, graceful as her green butterfly wings but more than a match for his vigor.

And matched well enough by Tequila, as Trinity exclaimed over the strength of her grasp. "Someone's feeling frisky, I see."

"I'm feeling something, that's for sure. I'd say that's a good way to put it."

"Well, it's good to feel in any case." Trinity nodded at a stool where her cane was propped as if to reserve it. "Have a seat?"

"Have a drink?" Clay's meaty fingers curled as if missing the one he wasn't. "Somebody's got to have all the fun I'm not."

"And the luck, if that black hole of your lack thereof hasn't sucked all the rest up entirely."

"Give a bloke his credit, will you? I had my moment."

"When those tittering birds were caught conspiring and that pair of yours won by default."

"When I caught them." Clay thumped his vest just below where it swallowed his necktie. "You can take me out of surveillance, but you can't shut off the monitor."

"I'd rather push some other of your buttons anyhow. Flip your switch, so to speak." Trinity leaned in, sly hand on tree trunk of thigh. "Or more so give it a wiggle."

"Just one, huh? Is that all I get?"

"If that's all it takes."

Clay snorted as if to distract from the flush creeping below his mask. "You know I can take a lot more than that."

"All the better to return it with interest. So, speaking of filling me in." Trinity turned to Tequila as she settled onto her stool with some arrangement of skirts. "It's been too bloody long, hasn't it? You must be as well occupied as I am."

Tequila smiled, knowing Trinity would have said as much a week past their last cocktail hour at the midsummer party. "I can't say my hands are quite that full."

"Really. I'd think you were juggling knives and fire to prepare for a party like this."

"That would be the kitchen staff, bless them for taking that heat."

"Even so, you must have some music in the air." Trinity looked conspiratorial as if in search of prime gossip to pass on more so as a tall tale than a retelling. "Any chance I might sneak a peek before it lands?"

Of course Trinity imagined Tequila to be on top of it all backstage and otherwise, just as she had mused about the grit and glamor of New Orleans, the excitement in its challenge, the inevitability of her triumph - building her up almost beyond reach of herself. "It's still hanging up there in the stratosphere, if you catch what I'm trying to say."

"That's no matter, though, is it? What goes up has to come down eventually, even if it takes a bit of doing." At a poke from Clay as he glanced over - "Or more."

"Eventually being the key word here."

"And? You've got a day. You've got time."

"I've got nothing. Well, nothing apt to wrap itself up that quickly."

Trinity sipped her cocktail with the same thought Clay was giving to his hand, to the rest of the table, to a lurking fellow in a boar's head mask who dressed and smelled an awful lot like that chain smoker of cheap cigars Greyson had taken such joy in baiting. "You've seen Clay's photos. You've seen how I work. All those concepts - all those little models to choose from."

"All that planning and consideration. It's always just so thought out, isn't it?"

"Oh, not always. Sometimes I have the marble, and that's it. Sometimes it sits there and taunts me as if I can feel the weight of its gravity. Sometimes I get just one idea - one model. And it happens to be so right that I go right to carving."

"How often does that happen?"

"Often enough, when I happen to need a miracle."

"Which would be?"

"A special occasion, a very particular pressure. A time when that lightning is just raring to strike."

Tequila folded, as did Trinity, when hands began to go on display. Clay threw down his full house with a triumphant shout and a seismic fist to the rail, rattling his fresh haul of chips and the ice in Trinity's glass as the dealing Four of Hearts let slip a knowing smile.

"All right, all right. I'd say this calls for a drink." Clay waved over a passing waiter. "For everyone."

"Not for me." Tequila indicated her empty tumbler. "This went right to my head and kept on going."

Trinity took a sip from hers, which was patiently halfway done. "All the better for the thrill of a chaser, right?"

"If that's what you call me taking a nose dive off this stool - I guess I've been on worse rides at the fire company fair."

"Then how bad can this be, really? It's just a party. You know that. I trust you won't make it a habit."

"Yeah. You won't." Clay swigged the cocktail he had accepted from a circulating tray while the waiter took orders all around. "You need another bad one of those like I need another dent in my head."

"So where is Lucas, anyhow?" Trinity teased.

Tequila rather wondered where Willow had gone after she implored her to go on ahead in the calm afterglow of their chitchat, enjoying the event on her own thoughtful terms that would hopefully intersect with the rest of theirs. "Playing the ringmaster as usual, I reckon. What about the boys? Where did they go running off to?"

"Dance practice. Go figure." Clay gave an amused grunt. "Never pegged my little bruv for such a twinkletoes."

"Or Grey for that sort of an influence," Trinity added.

"Damn well better than I thought when I first got sight of him. He's got Redd out of his shell, and in a suit, even. Or maybe more like a peek, but it's a start."

"It's more than that. If he's getting him out on the floor tonight, they must be well on their way."

"I guess they are, huh? Cheeky little git - ah, hell, he's a real mate. You know, of all the blokes in this world -" Clay raised his glass as if to toast. "I'm chuffed it had to be him."

Which left the question of where Tequila and Lucas were going - or not, as he had never picked up on her proposal for a dance of their own. Not that she had bothered to remind him, seeing as he had no reason to forget. A chance to show off and strike up the band, to parade them both with his usual sense of ceremony. A simple request for shared time that had escaped her as more of a plea.

"But I'm still the first to the altar. Can't say I expected that, either. I mean, look at me, for fuck's sake."

"You know I've always liked what I've seen." Trinity turned to Tequila while she considered whether to let on that Redd might not be far behind. "And I expect you'll be the belle of our festivities, if you'll pardon the wordplay."

Tequila laughed, more so from nerves than appreciation for the quip. "No pressure or anything."

"What did I just say about that when it came to special occasions?"

"Something about lightning, as I recall. It better not burn me to a crisp."

"Don't drive yourself mad thinking like that. You'll be fine. No - not fine." Trinity found Tequila's forearm with a gently encouraging grasp. "Brilliant."

Tequila pictured a tent over the garden courtyard, chairs draped in white cloth and wide ribbons. Redd at a piano in tails and corsage, weaving selections of sonatas into a gently building anticipation. Then striking up the march with a nod and a smile, a cue to raise her voice in kind. As she would, of course - she was here, after all, and these folks had just about gotten to be family. More so than Lucas, at least, and the pang of his absence struck her with equal determination to defy it. With a flash even further, another film reel entirely - her silhouette in the grand entrance, suitcases in hand and tickets all set and secure. Her back to that void as she faced the one beyond, the great blank slate where dreams might yet come to pass.

"I'll be something, that's for sure."

Trinity smiled. "Was there ever any doubt?"

* * *

Willow slipped through the spangled hordes with one eye out for the path of most discretion and the other for a glimpse of platinum and blue. The first took precedent as the second failed to deliver, leading her a long way around into the cozy lounge where Tequila had put on an abridged revue of Carmen with martini in hand and much shared laughter over improvised lyrics. Casino bells and barroom laughter distantly filtered through the meandering of a solo bassist, a slow meditation for the handful of guests lazing back from their cocktails. A mermaid and pirate queen hand in hand, with seashells in soft twists and gloss black bob, took Willow's sugar skull as proof that the day of the dead was already upon them this far from Sunday brunch. A dark and hulking man, bejeweled and masked like a gilded welder, figured this rather must be the recovery room. Especially as a slight old fellow in the vestments of a priest was sipping from what looked to be a chalice, and he raised it to Willow's gaze with a wink and a nod as she saw that indeed it was.

"A man of the cloth in a house of such vice." Willow slid into the seat beckoned to her. "Or so I'm meant to believe, yes?"

The priest, at least as he seemed, wore a mask pure white as his handlebar mustache, which failed to hide the ruddiness of drink on cheeks nearly as pale. "Perhaps if I can play the part well enough."

"You look it well enough for a start."

"I'd hope to be further along by now, given how long I've had to sort it out. To sort myself, I should say."

"There's no shame in that, no? Some of us have more of a ways to go than others."

"What if some of those might never get there?"

"They can get themselves out of the worst of it." Willow took a slow pull of the strange gin fizz she had chanced on from a serving table en route. "At least well enough to make the best of what they have."

"It's almost as if you know just why I left this place."

A story stretched and spun in Lucas' hands, maybe not so far from the truth - and close enough for the name just coming to mind. "For the Marquis to make better of it, Father Boone. Yes?"

The priest chuckled as if pleasantly surprised, or very much not at all. "Then it's almost as if I need no introduction, unless I do." An offered hand, a measured shake. "Lafcadio to most, Laffy to a particular few. Yourself included, of course, as any friend of Lucas is a friend of mine."

Willow suspected this hint of less savory communion was more implicit than incidental. "I'm a confidant, more so, but that seems close enough to count."

"Doubly much, I'd say, as that's a rare trust."

"I'm a rare sort."

"Not the sort I'd expect to see at such a soiree, I must admit."

"The feeling's mutual." Willow smiled. "As we're speaking of confession, I couldn't resist the invite."

"Neither could I, though it did take more than a few. My fireplace was richer for that kindling."

An act of resistance in itself, a hard stop to further temptation. "Better for that to burn than for you to do the same, yes?"

Lafcadio's shoulders sagged a hair as he looked off, taking a long and wistful drink. A gambling man himself, or so he had been, cashing out of that life with one last wager. A bold bet, a clean break, at least as Lucas had described it - but maybe not so pure, even if it were exactly as spoken.

"Yet now you've returned - unbound, unbidden. But not so unburdened, no?"

"I suppose it's impossible to hide, much as I've tried to. As if I could stay so long in my shadows when eyes such as yours are alight."

"Or stay so far from your old home. Your old friend."

"My old habits."

"You seem to be safe from them in here, unless that's one in your hand."

Lafcadio tipped his chalice like a hat. "One for the road, perhaps, though that was never the worst of it."

"Not quite down there with the roulette wheel, no?"

"Or everywhere else I courted my ruin. Or, for that matter, my fortune at others' expense."

Willow chose her words carefully with a commensurate eye for reaction. "Your win that was spun as your loss, yes?"

"Oh, but that it was." Another chuckle, so knowing, so admissive. "Perhaps a greater debt, I'd say, than this manor itself."

So the Brutale had been sinking after all, its obligations traded along with a piece of Lafcadio's soul. One last gamble indeed, whether bet or bargain, that a daredevil like Lucas would see its opportunities with the nerve to see them through. Or squander them in spendthrift magnificence and desperate deals, in the thrall of another addiction that might be very well apt to destroy him.

"How are you thinking to repay it?"

"I haven't thought that far ahead. Though I suppose I still need to take stock of it all before I can even begin."

Willow nodded. "Then it's almost as if I know just why you've returned."

"Or rather you already do. You said it yourself - I could only stay away for so long." Lafcadio looked into his chalice, inspecting its dregs with a shrug of finality. "Time's up."

"For your absence, yes. Not so much for the rest."

A conspicuous pause, a cynical hint of smile. "How confident of you to sum it up just so."

"Do you mean to say naive?"

"Perhaps, but only if I wouldn't offend."

"You'd only do that if you refused to explain."

Lafcadio bowed his head as if deciding on a place to start. At length, he settled back into his chair. "How much have you seen the Marquis in action?"

"I've seen the act he puts on, both in his parlors and mine."

"But you haven't seen him gamble."

"That I won't see through that act, but not otherwise, no."

"Do you suppose he's one to step away in the black? Or even to cut his losses before they begin to bleed him?"

Willow steeled herself with a good long drink, figuring that would go well beyond naivete into outright denial. "I suppose you put some sense into him before he lost a limb."

"Oh, that I did. Lucas had his rivals, of course - baronets and business magnates, lesser lords and greater braggarts - especially with a lady on the arm to impress. More often than not, he was his own worst enemy. And when he was, it took an act of God to haul him from the tables before the house took it all and then some."

"By that you mean yourself, yes? No wonder you felt such a calling."

Lafcadio laughed. "That's one reason, perhaps, but there was more to it than that. Yearning for a simpler life. Weariness of the one I was living."

"Atonement for its excess? For its temptations?"

A slow nod in response to words soft with understanding rather than needlessly sharpened into a directive. "Absolution for those tempted, unless they've fallen too far beyond that potential."

"This house is still standing, yes? I trust you can draw your conclusions."

"I trust that you've yet to see all that I have. The flickering lights. The hairline cracks. The repairs awaiting cash I could never quite scrape together." Lafcadio cast his gaze over the tufted leather seating, the stained glass sconces of red and green and gold, the swagged velvet backdrop of the half moon stage. "From the looks of all this, Lucas has done more than scrape."

Willow let slip a note of chagrin at Lucas carrying on as he was after all, at this reminder of the limits on her intuition. "And still not shored up what he needs to."

"He needs a shock, that's what. A finger to an outlet only just playing dead."

"A kick to the table where those bets of his are riding."

"More of a hatchet, I'd say. For firewood."

Willow flinched, flashing back to Lucas' offhand whim to just take a match to it all. "I'd rather it not go that far."

"Neither would I, but it does have to go far enough."

Willow considered Tequila's avoidance of a certain subject, her slow shift away from it with a dawning sense of liberty. "There is a matter at hand that just might force Lucas to fold his."

"Are you in a position to show it?"

"It isn't mine to reveal, no. Though I can let on that I'm close enough for confidence."

"Or blowing smoke, but somehow I doubt you're the type to do so."

"I'm one to throw cold water on it."

"Consecrated, I hope?"

"Not to your traditions, no, but very much to mine."

"A miracle, in any case." Lafcadio got up to take his leave, inspecting his chalice as if it were apt to fill on command. "Heaven forbid we actually need one."

The stage curtain rustled, billowed, grew a lump. It parted to reveal a questing brown hand, then a flash of metallic mask over a curled beard as extravagant as Willow had imagined. Greyson strolled out with just the slightest hitch in his swagger, pausing to neaten his crimson tailcoat and bow tie. The bassist continued to play, never missing a beat, as Redd showed himself with a lumbering sort of hesitation and horns that only served to put bells on the imposing height of his grey-suited figure.

Greyson took a bow, displaying the large padlock atop what turned out to be a full cap of layered plates, after Redd led them over for a hello. "How's that for an entrance?"

"Unexpected, but by no means unwelcome." Willow felt the start of a smile at this zeal to impress, these theatrics just edging into flamboyance. "All according to plan, yes?"

Redd cocked his head as if to wrinkle a brow behind his gilded guise of soft ivory and deep pronged blue. "I thought the plan was for stealth, or rather as much as I can manage."

"Well, a secret passage does go a long way."

"Especially when I'm ducking that full way, though at least I didn't need to crawl."

"True, true, there are better places to be on all fours."

Redd gave Greyson a nudge. "And better subjects for polite company."

"And worse ones for slips of the tongue, but let's keep that zipped up for now." Greyson turned to Willow with a contemplative stroke of his beard. "A skeleton out of the closet, eh? I'll see that and raise you mine."

Willow recalled Greyson's sales pitch, relayed to her secondhand with all awe and no judgment, as he began to produce a thin metal case. "Ex-con expert locksmith, yes? What a way to break out, so to speak."

"It was either that, or be broken." Greyson slid his business cards back away with no apparent surprise at his reputation preceding him. "Like this record of mine that still keeps on playing, much as I've tried to tune it out."

"Much as you've done, more so." Redd laid a gentle hand on Greyson's back. "And so very well at that."

"Much better than I expected, that's for certain." Greyson leaned into that hint of embrace, sharing a look that lingered a beat beyond mutual appreciation. "Especially before I got to be in such good hands."

Willow had caught a few notes about the consultancy that had introduced them, tests of security that took Greyson into all manner of safes and strongboxes and servants' passages like the one behind the impromptu show of his appearance. How much temptation must he have faced, how many of Lucas' accounts and artifacts so prime for the plunder. Yet here Greyson was, an invited and honored guest, as if he had kept hands in pockets instead of stuffing them senseless. Now he seemed content with a smidge of harmless mischief and the company kept in the bargain - who, from the crisp and controlled flow of his blackjack table, might be just as cordially helping to keep him in line.

Willow smiled. "Sounds like your own were well on the right track before that."

"I'd hope so. Still, even the best of us can use a conductor."

Redd's voice took on a sly appreciation. "Or stand to go a bit off the rails every now and then."

"Just a bit?" A snort of mock offense. "Clearly I've been slacking on the job."

"I thought you were retired."

"I am, but I'm hardly dead."

"Of course not. Shall we go and liven things up, then?"

Greyson nodded at Willow. "That means you, too, if you want. Unless you're already having enough fun in here for all of us."

Willow considered the warmth of this invitation, further chance to show off though it was. The hope so clear in those masked faces for their companionship and hers. For the Brutale itself, which had brought them together and somehow stronger for its perils.

"I could stand to have a bit more."

"Just a bit?"

Willow echoed that amusement as they made their way out of the lounge. "I never said that was all."

* * *

"Pick a card, any card." Clay fanned the deck from one cradling hand to the other with hamfisted pokes of his thumb and enough pomp in his patter to draw glances from a zoot suited wolf and feathered harlequin drifting through that slow respite between the aftermath of dinner and festivities to follow. "Soon as you say stop, it's a go."

Greyson watched closely across the small table of their sitting area, lips pursed and chin propped as if pondering the combination of a safe. He shot fingers under the fan and came out with an ace of spades being kept beneath. "I'll go for this one right here, then."

"Bloody hell, mate. You can't just let me have this, huh?"

"Like that little three card monte scam I bankrupted back at the spring soiree?" Greyson playfully brandished his card. "Got to keep that sleight of hand sharp."

"It was close enough, really, just rather more abrupt than planned." Redd's smile had been spreading throughout this display as his unseen brows must have likewise raised. "Besides, we let you have all the rest."

"That ace of diamonds that was really a heart," Tequila volunteered, having had her own suspicions about the card placed just so between two others.

"And those two rounds of five hands just happening to make a royal flush." Trinity stroked her cane with some satisfaction. "Even I could see how that worked."

"Even, my arse." Clay gave Trinity a gentle squeeze as they leaned toward each other as if to appreciate her card counting skills that had made their introduction. "It would be a right shame if you didn't."

"Even more of a shame if you don't try to put another one past me. Turnabout and fair play and all."

"Nah. I'd better quit while I'm ahead, or at least not too far in the hole. I've got to put the shovel down sometime, right?"

"If you insist, though it's the last sort of weekend you ought to." Trinity turned to Tequila, inviting her to fill in the blank. "After all -"

"It's just a party," Tequila finished with the only sort of verve she could manage. Nothing near Trinity's saucy spiel, her beckoning hand of temptation that had pulled them away from poker when an old friend of Clay's showed up with the mask of a tiger and a wrestler's clinch of a handshake. Then into the gardens and their own conversation, Trinity's growing insistence that Tequila record an album - something tangible as her statues, a touchstone of her career. Or a millstone, more so, if it were made with the sort of honesty that such a thing deserved - of promises realized, or anything but, forever to be questions in search of fulfillment.

"That's not quite the spirit I expected." Normally a tease, now a concern. "Are you feeling all right? Is something not sitting well with you?"

"Like that food I've got to eat with a pinky out. It does one hell of a number on me." Clay grunted. "Especially kicking and screaming out the other end."

Redd shook his head. "And don't I ever know that all too well."

"Just drop that bath bomb you've got there and call it good." Clay jerked a nod at the garnished column of pastel layers Redd had been sold as tonight's special and was sipping with some hesitation. "You going to stick a brolly in there with that fruit basket, bruv?"

"I'd rather pawn off this bit of rookery on someone else." Redd set the glass up for grabs on the table. "Any takers?"

Trinity's test sip twisted her lipsticked mouth from a slight play of smile into a disappointed pucker. "It's all froth and cloying. Like those awful dresses Mum would stuff me into for the benefit of relations one step from the morgue."

Greyson took the vial between thumb and finger, holding it up with some ceremony before bringing it to his nose. "It smells pink." Then the verdict, with a brisk shake of curled beard - "It tastes pink."

Clay shot Greyson a look that might as well have been an elbow. "That's a color, not a flavor."

"Not when it's blue and purple."

"Close enough for my purposes. The pink stuff has a way of settling a thing or two." With a slight shrug, Tequila downed the cocktail in one go. "Bottoms up."

But the drink failed to follow doctor's orders, coating Tequila's tongue with its sugary aftertaste as everything else continued to stick. The void of Lucas long since starting to prick at each offhand question of where he was and what grand entrance he was thinking to make. That of Willow, who had joined them for dinner before drifting away from her perch on the edge of a group too new and large for her comfort. The rhythms of these contented couples, their private jokes and public affection. Of the clock beneath this night, that ever present metronome. That countdown to the dance, the drop of its needle - or maybe the same of some unknown shoe.

"Is it working?" Trinity asked shortly after the decisive click of drained glass on inlaid cherry.

"It's doing something, that's for sure. But it doesn't seem to be anything good."

"Can you use a chaser?"

"Honestly? I can use a bit of a lie down." Tequila stood up as four masks turned her way with a shared pause of concern long enough for her to think she owed them something better. "Excuse me."

* * *

Tequila rather had a walkoff as she sought a quiet nook of the manor apart from private quarters that would more so be deafening in their silence. Instead she found a constant burr of human presence - a red queen in the library, a peacock and jester having a giggle in a distant corner of the gardens, an aviator in Victorian stripe and leather corset who had flown up to the practice rooms to try her hand at piano. Her knock at Willow's door went unanswered, itself a gentle push back toward the festivities and the fun she was more than capable of finding.

Tequila dropped by the bar for a jumpstarting slug of vodka and a glass of bubbly for the road. The dance was already in full swing, she still in the process of ramping up, and she edged into a comfortable spot within the onlookers encircling the great hall. There was the odd freeze frame of recognition, the sidestep and deferential gesture, but those intrigued eyes all turned right back to the floor. Tequila was another guest, another mask. Another sequined shadow beneath dimmed chandeliers, part of the spectating crowd rather than apart and alone to be pitied.

"Keeping an eye out for someone?"

Tequila did not recognize the mellow voice or the large man it belonged to, but she had enough of an idea from the golden gleam of his welder's mask and the miniature tools around the brim of his bowler. This had to be Aurum, aptly named goldsmith and glazier - or fat braggart extraordinaire, as per an offhand snort from Greyson about rumored Runes family ties to the House of Faberge and its confections of porcelain crafted for czars and coveted by collectors. If Tequila had sung for him, he gave no sign, just as his question was very much innocuous and not at all pointed.

"I have a couple in mind." Tequila sipped her champagne as if its sparkling bite could lift her out of the strange pull between disappointment of absence and anticipation of entrance. "Plus one more, if I can hope she'll care to join."

"Hope away. The night's still young." Aurum did a brief and jaunty shuffle, so earnest Tequila had to smile. "And this party's just getting started."

"I guess it is, isn't it? I'm just not sure it's her scene."

"But it could be, by the flip side of that very same token."

"It could. We'll see." Tequila nodded, appreciating that optimism even as it had yet to sink in. "These shindigs do bring their share of surprises."

The drummer rolled up to a cymbal crash, a windup and opening pitch cracked wide into breakneck rhythm. Blue horns jumped in a full head above hordes that rippled out as if from a cannonball, pulling back into a circle that soon gave Tequila enough of a view to grin just as widely as those onlookers trying so hard to clap on the beat. Greyson shook and shimmied, backslid and spun, padlock dancing as he bounced to his knees and back as if straight from some swinging movie reel. Suit jacket shed like his inhibitions, Redd jived right along with surprising agility, enthusiasm more than making up for the odd fallback to a head-bobbing stomp so energetic as to be downright precious.

"Couples and surprises, am I right?" Aurum smiled. "It's almost like you called that."

"I knew those two were up to something." Tequila felt a stab of longing as Redd crouched down and beckoned, catching Greyson's leap into his arms to a round of applause. "But that right there is something else."

"That's got to be something, busting it out like that."

"It really does, doesn't it?" Tequila knocked back the last of her champagne before ditching the glass on a tray making the rounds for that purpose. "I sure wish I knew."

"Ticker trouble?" Aurum touched a sympathetic hand to his chest. "Now that's a thing I do know."

"No, not exactly. Sad to hear that, though - that really has to put the brakes on."

"It's not so bad. It might give me pause from time to time." Aurum watched the flow of festivities as the band settled into a comfortable groove. "But that doesn't mean I have to sit it all out."

Tequila figured that went doubly for her when Aurum gestured toward the floor with a turn of broad and bejeweled hand. They fell into an easy shuffle, casually distant but close enough for acquaintance. Then a light touch at arm's length as the music slowed to bring couples together, reeled in mask to mask by the alluring wend of saxophone.

"How's your heart holding up?" Tequila asked.

"Got a bit up there once or twice, but it's all good now. How about you? Have I been stepping anywhere I shouldn't?"

"You haven't squished me yet, so I'm all good, too. At least for now."

"How about for later?"

"Maybe. Hopefully. We'll see." Tequila tried to return that kindly tease, to focus on the friendship being shared as opposed to the romance that wasn't. "With the night being young and all."

The dance floor turned in slow currents of lovers fading in and out of vision, of warmly held waists and the near kiss of masks. Clay and Trinity, stepping with a smooth and practiced energy. Greyson and Redd, no longer so fancy with the footwork but too close to care. The pirate and her mermaid just as sensually entwined, the aviator who had wrapped up her piano practice in favor of catching the moon. Then a long black ponytail sleek as the sharp suit of its wearer, his likewise embellished beak so nearly embraced by twin white doves beneath a tendriled cloud of candlelit red. As meant to be as all the rest, as if they long since already were.

"Still all good? Did you see your friend?"

"I saw somebody's friend." A mouthful of venom from the sting of that flinching bite, just about spat in its refusal to be swallowed. "Not one of mine, that's for sure."

"Were they ever?"

"Apparently not in the first place."

When Aurum pulled back as if giving space, Tequila went to seize this chance to cut and run. Instead she kept on and kept at it, eyes on her partner rather than the sight she should have damn well seen a good mile off. Only in the breath between songs did she excuse herself in a voice beginning to choke, head high and tears blinked back through the casino to the blessed emptiness of the grand staircase. To a fast flight up and away, skirts hitched and heels shed after a near catch on the edge of a runner.

* * *

Willow's door was still shut, the adjacent shared washroom open for business. Tequila locked up and sat down, shaking on the cold edge of clawfoot tub as her eyes welled over into wracking sobs for that double dealing bastard who couldn't even be a man and break it off like one. For her own failure to buck up and do the same, to read that writing clear as a front page headline. For the reproach of her mask as she fumbled it off, as if it sensed her spike of urge to smash it on the marble floor. To break something so beautiful as if that could bring back what was long since lost, or grind it to dust beneath her heel.

When a gentle knock came after a distant toll of the bell tower, Tequila croaked out some sort of apology as she threw a token splash on the red of her eyes and the streaks of glitter below. There was only the wordless response of unlatching, a followup creak of hinges, a welcome shadow in the mirror. Willow brought a box of tissues in one hand and a cup of tea in the other, set down to steep as she settled herself onto the wooden lid of the toilet.

"Please tell me you put a shot in that." Tequila snuffled, blew her nose. "Because right about now, I can damn well fucking use one."

"Please tell me you won't apologize for your language." Willow produced a flask from some inner pocket of her dress and poured a slug into the tea. "Or anything else there's no need to."

"There's no need for this. For any of it." A sip, a gulp, a blessed burn of rum spice all the way to the gaping pit of her stomach. "Ma's right. I should have come home, gone to community college. Sang at church and the ball games and all that. What in blue hell was I even doing?"

"The best that you could, and you know it. Yes?"

"Maybe I don't, because I sure seem to be doing my worst right now."

Willow edged closer as if to say that she wasn't. Her hand reached out, as sure as Tequila's was shaky, latched onto like the rope of a life preserver. So soft and yet so strong, so giving in its reception of any tears and rage yet to come, of snapped speculation on what sad excuse for a man would see fit to do this and what similar sort of woman would have the gall to take him up. So much that the snidest of such thoughts began to fade away unspoken, melted by the warmth of that velvet gaze.

"I should be better. I can be better. Wish them both well and all. Lord knows she's more cut out for him than I am."

"So you know her, yes?"

"Not that well, but well enough. She eats up every last crumb of his stories, his mystique. His whole dog and pony puppet show. And he's been nailing up this art of hers just as fast as she can paint it. This tricky sort of business, more like a prank, pretending to be something else until you get too close. Something nice until it isn't, and then it's laughing at you. Like it's -" Tequila grasped at a mouthful of a term maybe heard twice about this sort of thing and the way Eleanor had seen fit to greet her sandwiches at tea. "Like it has a mind of its own, you know?"

Willow filled in the blank with a nod. "Anthropomorphic."

"You're just too good with words, aren't you? No wonder you get on so well with Mr. Redd." Tequila swallowed a gripe about how someone so book smart could be so clueless in certain other ways that Willow was very much not. "But doesn't she sound so much like Lucas?"

"You sound so charitable for someone who saw the same close dance as I did."

"Oh, I could sound much worse, believe me. But I mean what I say when I want to be better."

"You want to be fair, yes?"

"You know it, much as I'd rather break that son of a biscuit as much as he broke me. But I guess that would still fit the bill." Tequila let off a laugh that gave rise to a fresh skim of prisms, fragmenting the grace of Willow's expression before she blinked them away. "Equal return on investment and all."

"It wouldn't be fair to you. To the strength you can't see through those tears." A soft squeeze of hand, deepened upon its return. "You're hurting, yes. But by no means broken, even if your heart was twice over."

"I'm hiding in the bathroom on one of the biggest nights of the year. Bawling like it's high school all over again. Funny, isn't it? How getting the guy ends up just the same."

"You're taking a break. A breather. Pouring out that poison instead of caving when it calls you to drink."

"Or maybe I'm just wallowing in it. Dumping it all on your head." Tequila studied the dregs of her tea, the lazy swirl of leaves in sweet amber. "There's no sense in that, now, is there?"

"There's plenty to be had in talking through the worst of it."

"I guess so." A sardonic laugh. "So of course that goes to show why Lucas never wanted to."

"He is one to avoid, yes."

"You're telling me. Too bad the me of last year didn't get that memo." Tequila dabbed her eyes, smearing them further and caring even less. "Then the me of right now wouldn't be the last one to know."

"You knew. Maybe not the whole story, no, but enough to put more work into yours. Seeking out. Branching out. Finding your own happiness, yes?"

"I was getting there, or at least starting to. Especially tonight, with my in-laws. With you." Tequila warmed at a shift in Willow's expression, the barest gape of sable eye and slender mouth. "And still this went and smacked me in the face."

"Of course it did. It hurts to see that all spelled out, no matter how much you've pieced together."

"Or how much you thought you'd put to rest."

"Not so easy as blowing out a candle, no?" Willow touched the skull of her miniature top hat, still pinned at its fashionable angle though her mask was long since removed. "Just say the word, and I'll light one to help."

"Have a chat with Baron Samedi, you mean?" Tequila began to feel vague stirrings of graveyard dust and cigar smoke, of the licentious cackle of spirits. Of the bones beneath it all, the uncertain power of what they might give rise to. "I don't think you have to do that."

"He'd think otherwise. It's been some time since we talked." Willow smiled. "He'll surely talk my ear off on just how long I'm overdue."

"Can he wait till tomorrow, then?"

"Only if you want to. He can wait a while longer if you don't."

Tequila wanted to ask what such a while really was, as if it might be spun into a maybe leaning toward never. But that would be a slap to Willow's hand, a slam of her open door. A shredding of invite, a spurning of favor - which, like the bone throw, was apt to be more relief than disturbance.

"Let me sleep on that, if I can find some spot for a campout. Hell if I'm about to go freeze in my end of that empty bed." Or feel a worse sort of chill if it happened to be shared.

"You're more than free to warm yourself in mine."

Tequila took a flattered pause at the reflex of this offer, at the tenderness of its phrasing. "I am?"

A vocal lilt, the slightest tease. "Only if you want to."

"I don't want to put you on the floor."

"You won't. There's room for two."

"Just enough, or more than that?"

"Enough to feel empty with a friend of mine in need."

Tequila thought of Willow's weight beside her, her dark braid along amicably turned back. The peace of her expression in slumber, of her own without makeup or worry. The hand that had made no move to let go, still so naturally in hers as though it belonged.

"Why don't I come and see for myself?"


End file.
